The B-Sides: Q&A With Virologist Vincent Racaniello
Here, the virus researcher discusses education in the U.S., funding, and how he got his start.
Vincent Racaniello is a professor of microbiology and immunology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. A coauthor of the text, “Principles of Virology,” Racaniello has been researching viruses like polio since the 1970s and podcasts and lectures about them for free online. I interviewed him last week for TheStreet, and he discussed his views on the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, new technology and how there is only one known strain of the novel coronavirus and no evidence so far of a variant that can meaningfully evade vaccines now in use in the U.S. (Note, variants are different from strains, as you can read in the original interview.For more context, please see that story here.)
What he said about how many people are turned off to science in school really struck me. You’ll see what I’m talking about below, but it made me reflect on how a high school biology class, in retrospect, made me feel like science was getting further out of reach. Probably others can relate. So, I didn’t want parts of this interview that didn’t fit in the story to go unheard.
What pushed Racaniello to tell the world about viruses was after the bioterror mail attacks in 2001, he heard top U.S. health officials calling the bacterium that causes the anthrax disease a "virus.” Most of the following is material that did not make it into the original story for space reasons. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Smith: After that anthrax scare 20 years ago, here we are in this pandemic. Last year, we saw how it was handled under Health and Human Services director Alex Azar, and we saw some Americans reject the reality of the disease and even protest mask wearing and other measures to protect public health. Do you think one thing this pandemic has shown is a lack of science education in the U.S.?
Racaniello: I definitely think so. I’ve always thought, and many others have thought, that there’s not really good science education in this country, starting at elementary school. I saw my kids get taught about science – it’s all about memorizing things. That’s not what science is. Science is discovery. If you teach kids discovery, they are going to like it. … But, also, who gets taught about viruses in any substantial way? I think the pandemic has brought out the general lack of knowledge (about viruses).
Smith: …As these drugs and vaccines come out, the big pharma names get a lot of attention, and deservedly so – Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca. But isn’t it university research that lays a lot of the ground work for what we know about viruses?
Racaniello: Sure, in the U.S., anyway, it’s a combination of the National Institutes of Health and then to a lesser extent the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture, and then the universities kick in some, but I think they should do more….
But NIH’s budget is about $37 billion a year, and that’s just pathetic. If you think about the return on investment for things like (gene-editing tool) CRISPR, recombinant DNA, polymerase chain reaction – PCR – it’s huge. This pandemic has cost a trillion and a fraction of that could have been used beforehand to make antivirals that could have stopped the pandemic. They don’t invest enough in science research in this country. India and China are starting to outpace us. They get it. Science can save the population.
Smith: On that point, I was looking at some of the NIH funding you got for polio research in the mid-1980s and it was around $130,000 or $150,000. When I plugged it into an inflation calculator, it turned out to be the equivalent of more than what some of your recent grants are. Has the funding stagnated?
Racaniello: It has not kept up with inflation. We’re losing money. And, it’s become harder to get funded, because there are more people in the field, so the pot is divided up. … You can’t even have a small lab anymore, you have to have a big lab – a huge lab with a lot of people and then you need multiple grants. It’s a huge issue. Small labs can’t compete, even though they might have really good ideas.
Smith: Viruses — as you explain — some are beneficial, some seem inconsequential, and some deadly. They are so small, you can’t even imagine how small they are. And they are technically not even living. And yet, they can do more damage than even the biggest military weapon can ….
Racaniello: …For the public, because they can’t see them, they can’t imagine that they could be so dangerous, right? Yet, the numbers are astounding. So, it’s just a matter of education. We need to teach this to people in a way that’s engaging, and I try to do that in my lectures. I get asked a lot to speak to groups, and at the end, they say, “Wow, that was fun to learn.” I think that’s an under appreciated skill and not everyone has it. But that’s what you need to teach people, because people are reluctant to learn, because most people have a bad experience in their elementary school or high school, and they never want to learn anymore, and I think that’s a problem with science and the general public.
Smith: How did you get into virology?
Racaniello: My dad was a doctor and he wanted me to be a doctor and I really had no interest. So, I ended up majoring in biology in college. I never made any effort to get into medical school, so I graduated with no real career plan. So, I like science, so I ended up moving home and got a job as a lab technician. I ended up having a lot of fun manipulating bacteria, and at one point I read a book called “Fever,” which is a story about the discovery of lassa virus in the ‘60s. That was an eye-opener. I didn’t know that viruses came from animals, that they spilled over and could do all these amazing things. So, I thought I have to be a virologist. I was lucky, I had gone to school with the son of a very famous virologist, Edwin Kilbourne, who was chair of microbiology at Mt. Sinai. I went to my friend’s house for dinner one night … and I said, “I want to be a virologist, what should I do?” He said, “Come to Mt. Sinai, and get your PhD. So, I did. … It was really accidental. But I tell people, look, I got interested in something, I figured out how to pursue it. You have to be curious, you have to be passionate.
I worked with Peter Palese and as a post-doc, David Baltimore (at MIT). He had just gotten a Nobel Prize for discovering reverse transcriptase, which is the basis for … so much biotechnology. It was a very exciting place and that’s where I started on polio. So there was no question that I would have my own lab doing research — and I was lucky to do that. Since 1982, that’s what I’ve been up to.