Summer 2000 The
Hot Zone
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That
such labs are necessary seems to be unquestionable. Nancy Cox,
for instance, who is chief of the influenza branch at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, describes Layne's proposal
as "the way of the future, no doubt about it." Bill
Patrick, former chief of "product development" for the
U.S. biomunitions program, responded to a question about whether
such labs were necessary with a pithy "My God, yes!"
He went on to explain that the present options for successfully
dealing with an act of bioterrorism or biowarfare are "essentially
zero." According to Patrick, who recently lectured at Layne's
course on bioterrorism at the School of Public Health, such automated
laboratories would not only provide a mechanism for quickly analyzing
the hundreds of thousands of samples that would be collected during
such an attack - to characterize the agent or agents and map how
widely they had been dispersed-but also a potentially powerful
means of deterrence to prevent any nations or terrorist groups
from thinking they could get away with such an attack.
Sitting
in a café in Santa Monica on a glorious spring afternoon,
Layne looks less like a man obsessed with nightmarish visions than
an academic version of Nathan Lane, with a tan that comes from thrice-weekly
mountain biking jaunts in the Santa Monica mountains. Layne, who
is now 45, is describing the unforeseen path he took to end up the
resident expert at UCLA in biological apocalypse. He studied medicine
at Case Western Reserve but opted out of his internship after three
months at UC San Francisco because, he says, the conditions were
"not very humane for budding physicians." From there,
he meandered. He finished his internship in psychiatry and then
moved on to Los Alamos, working on nonlinear dynamics and laser
spectroscopy, of all things. That led to two years at Stanford studying
applied physics before returning to Los Alamos in the late 1980s
to help model the mathematics of AIDS epidemics. The AIDS work was
supposed to be a summer stint, but infectious diseases became his
career.
In 1992,
Layne returned to UCLA to finally finish his internship and residency
and, two years later, joined the faculty in epidemiology while simultaneously
starting a fellowship in infectious diseases. Based on his formal
training, he now considers himself not so much a public-health expert
or epidemiologist, but more "an experimentalist who knows a
little bit of theory and a little bit of engineering."
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