Quote:Dr. Wolfe spent over eight years conducting biomedical research in both sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. He is also the founder of Metabiota, which offers both governmental and corporate services for biological threat evaluation and management. He serves on the editorial board of EcoHealth and Scientific American and is a member of DARPA's Defense Science Research Council. His laboratory was among the first to discover and describe the Simian foamy virus.

Wolfe has been awarded more than $40 million in funding from a diverse array of sources including the U.S. Department of Defense, Google.org, the National Institutes of Health, the Skoll Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Geographic Society.
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Quote:Obviously, there is a tremendous interest in viruses that are deleterious. One of the things I would point out, first of all, is that there is so much diversity of viruses: most of them are probably neutral, many of them are ecologically important, some of them are actually mutualistic with their hosts. Having said that, there is a huge fascination with negative viruses, and negative microorganisms, that can spread like the 1918 influenza and HIV—SARS had the potential to do this. These are all agents, which have the potential to relatively quickly have a devastating impact on human populations.
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Now I would like to spin a slightly different scenario. Let's say we had been studying more comprehensively this interface between humans and animals and trying proactively to predict these pandemic. We would have known about a neglected virus that existed in Central Africa. We would have known that it was transmitted through many, many different routes in Africa, most commonly through heterosexual forms of transmission.

For SARS, which really at the end of the day affected only about 1,500 - 2,000 individuals, the estimates are billions of dollars of economic impact from even that, which was an aborted pandemic. It was a very short and aborted pandemic. Really what my work is about is trying to aim at this objective of achieving the final plague.

If you want to think about my work, one way to think of me is as a curator of microbial collections. I have these massive repositories. I have sites all around the world that are aimed at collecting interesting microorganisms, and then I enter into collaborations with different groups. Instead of coming to look at my beetle collections, I send them specimens that I think they are likely to find of interest, and they study them for novel agents. Really it's sort of a microbial museum. As a consequence, I have a very low footprint in the USA. I have an office not much bigger than your suite. It's not huge. Even though my enterprise is very costly to sustain, it is very easy for me to move around.