American - Scientist | August 24, 1970 -
With epidemics, people have been standing on the shore, waiting for the gusher to hit the ocean. But to prevent epidemics, you have to look at the various little sources that feed into the river.
Nathan Wolfe
OceanRiverWaitingPeopleYouLook
I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us.
WorkLuckPotentialEarlyCreateUs
We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there - which is the category that HIV falls into - and we're very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans.
TimeNew ThingsWorldNewSeeOut
The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.
GlobalizationConsequencesAnimalsUs
If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.
AnimalChanceBecomeHumanFirst
We've put huge resources into predicting tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. HIV/AIDS is like an earthquake that's lasted 30 years and touched every country on the planet. We have such incredible capacity to think about the future, it's time we used it to predict biological threats. Otherwise we'll be blindsided again and again.
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Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter, in whatever field you choose to explore.
StoryThinkYouChooseDarkGo
We may have charted all the continents on the planet, and we may have discovered all the mammals, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth.
EarthNothingExploreMeanPlanet
Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we've reached a point where we've discovered most of the things. I'm going tell you right now: Please don't despair.
PeopleThinkYouNowRightDespair
We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.
PotentialKnowOutNowhereNasty
We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.
LiveWorldToolsNewNowBuild
As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.
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