Nathan Wolfe of Metabiota: On the Hunt for New Viruses
Virologist Nathan Wolfe is on the race to find new diseases and the growing risk of epidemics
What scares the virologist Nathan Wolfe?
Having spent years living in Africa, at times trekking through the forest to work with hunters exposed to animal diseases, he’s not particularly squeamish about being near dangerous viruses. “Most people who go into my business aren’t germaphobes,” he says with a laugh. Sitting at home in his colorful San Francisco living room, what most worries him are “the things that haven’t appeared yet,” he says. “If there was something that kept me up at night, it likely would be an agent that had the capacity to spread, with the symptoms only coming sometime later.”
Dr. Wolfe, 44, has also been preoccupied recently with the Ebola crisis in West Africa and fears over new influenza viruses. As a visiting biology professor at Stanford University and the founder of Global Viral, a research institute, and Metabiota, a forecasting company, he has spent much of his career coming up with ways to combat pandemics. (Metabiota sells disease-surveillance systems, epidemic data and analytics to government agencies and companies.)
The probability that a disease can jump from animals to humans and then become a large-scale epidemic has increased as the world’s population has grown and become more mobile, says Dr. Wolfe (who is no relation to this writer). Picking up viruses from animals is a primary way that new epidemics originate. “We’ve moved further into forests, and we have more contact with some of these animals, and simultaneously, we’ve surrounded ourselves with much more intensive livestock production,” he says. “We’ve kind of wrapped this planet in a layer of biomass…of human tissue and domestic-animal tissue that fundamentally alters the properties of how these bugs emerge” and propagate themselves.