Big Think

Topic: Infectious diseases.

Charles Knirsch: In the 1970’s when [Richard] Nixon announced the war on cancer, budgets were decreased for infectious diseases. This has been well published and talked about. It involved the scientific and the live press, and look what happened: HIV, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, West Nile virus. I think we’ve responded now. What we can’t do is relax our surveillance for emerging diseases, our laboratory capabilities to study these organisms, and then to scale up to have useful either therapeutic or vaccines.

Topic: Responding to the next pandemic.

Charles Knirsch: When SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] hit,and people probably have forgotten SARS, it was terrifying what happened. And it was like an influenza type of illness, and the company I worked for actually synthesized 65 compounds in less than a year, in a very much Manhattan Project-like environment too. Then the disease went away, inexplicably. I think that capability to quickly respond--

Also I’m a firm believer in science evolving and new technologies becoming available, so wouldn’t it be nice and actually we are working on this technology to have a vaccine response that take weeks, and not in nearly a year in some cases. And so there are approaches and we are working in that field as well.

So it’s about having existing capabilities and not relax the guard both on surveillance of new diseases and also develop ability to respond.

Conducted on: July 15, 2009.