The Virus Hunter

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin was spending the afternoon prowling his empire of viruses. The Center for Infection and Immunity, which he directs, occupies three floors of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Rather than wait for the elevator, Dr. Lipkin ran up and down the back stairs to move from floor to floor, leaning into the doorways of labs and glass-walled offices to get updates from a platoon of scientists.

Gustavo Palacios was sequencing the genes from a new strain of Ebola virus found in a bat in Spain — a worrisome development, since the fatal virus has almost never been found outside Africa.

Nick Bexfield of the University of Cambridge had flown from England with a new hepatitis virus that has just broken out in British dogs.…

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