By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY
Wondering whom to blame for the rising tide of infectious diseases? Stanford microbiologist Stanley Falkow likes to answer the question with a quip drawn from the ageless wisdom of a classic comic strip, Walt Kelly's Pogo.
"The enemy is us," he says, noting that human behavior often drives germs that, for millennia, minded their own business to turn into troublemakers.
Take Legionnaire's disease, caused by bacteria spewed into the atmosphere by air conditioners, Jacuzzis and supermarket produce irrigators. Or HIV and the SARS virus, which leaped to humans from wild animals butchered for their meat. A growing threat is a man-made epidemic of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
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If anyone should know, it's Falkow. He has spent more than half a century immersed in the overlapping realms of man and microbe. He has explained, among other things, how bacteria survive waves of toxic antibiotics by swapping drug-resistance genes.
Falkow's latest honor was the 2008 Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Science, handed out Sept. 26 in New York. The Lasker awards are often referred to as "America's Nobels." Lasker recipients sometimes win Nobel Prizes, too. Falkow's award comes with a cash prize of $300,000.
Germs aren't evil
"I consider him the father of research into the mechanisms that germs use to cause disease," says Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute at George Washington University.
Oddly enough, Falkow's sympathies lie with the germs.
"There's been this tendency to equate microbes with something that's dirty and dangerous," he says. "It simply isn't true."
Rather, he says, germs are much of what we're made of. "There are 10 times more microbial cells in humans than there are people cells," Falkow says. "If you're a bacteriologist like me, you view people as a platform for carrying bacteria around."
David Relman of Stanford University, a former student, says: "He has always had more affection for microbes than people. They're more creative, they're more capable as a population, they evolve more quickly, they sacrifice for each other, they adapt to new environments and they're more predictable."
For decades, Relman says, researchers ignored bacteria that don't cause disease. Falkow was fascinated by them, an interest that half a century later has gripped other scientists, too. Probably the best measure of their interest is the National Institutes of Health's $115 million Human Microbiome Project, an attempt to characterize the menagerie of trillions of microorganisms that populate healthy humans.
Falkow says his fascination with bugs began at 11, when he read a book by Paul de Kruif called Microbe Hunters, which frames the stories of such researchers as Louis Pasteur as scientific mysteries.
"Bacteria are important in all facets of life, from making sauerkraut to what goes on in the soil," he says. "I became enchanted with bacteria and the discovery of organisms that cause disease."
Soon he became obsessed with trying to figure out what distinguishes disease-causing bacteria from friendlier ones. "I pestered my professors," he wrote in Nature Medicine in October. He couldn't have come up with the question at a better time: Researchers had just begun developing the tools he would need to delve into the genes that give germs life.
He made a series of profoundly important discoveries, what he calls the "Zen" of what makes an organism capable of causing disease. One of his first groundbreaking discoveries was that little packets of genetic material, called plasmids, carry a single gene that makes bacteria resistant to ampicillin, an explanation for the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, which emerged almost as soon as penicillin began to be used.
Falkow later proved that virulence genes also could migrate from one microorganism to another. "The organism that causes diphtheria is a totally benign bug that can sit in your throat for 100 years," Relman says. "A gene carried by a virus that only infects the diphtheria bug turns it into a virulent organism" by giving it the power to produce toxin.
'Still with the germs, Stanley?'
For a guy who deals with such weighty questions, Falkow is "very irreverent," says Ralph Isberg of Tufts, another former student. "He doesn't take himself too seriously, or anybody else, for that matter." Falkow says that may be the influence of his mother, who still asks: "Still with the germs, Stanley?"
He is especially proud of his role in training more than 100 researchers, many of whom run their own labs.
Marshall Bloom of the Rocky Mountain National Laboratory in Hamilton, Mont., says his sons, who grew up calling Falkow "Zeyde," the Yiddish word for grandfather, "were mesmerized by Stanley from a very young age. I'm confident that he's at least part of the reason they're ending up in science."
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