“The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is a virus.”

-Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate³¹⁴⁵

Extinction

Senate Majority Leader Frist describes the recent slew of emerging diseases in almost biblical terms: “All of these [new diseases] were advance patrols of a great army that is preparing way out of sight.”³¹⁴⁶ Scientists like Joshua Lederberg don’t think this is mere rhetoric. He should know. Lederberg won the Nobel Prize in medicine at age 33 for his discoveries in bacterial evolution. Lederberg went on to become president of Rockefeller University. “Some people think I am being hysterical,” he said, referring to pandemic influenza, “but there are catastrophes ahead. We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses. There is no guarantee that we will be the survivors.”³¹⁴⁷

There is a concept in host-parasite evolutionary dynamics called the Red Queen hypothesis, which attempts to describe the unremitting struggle between immune systems and the pathogens against which they fight, each constantly evolving to try to outsmart the other.³¹⁴⁸ The name is taken from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen instructs Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”³¹⁴⁹ Because the pathogens keep evolving, our immune systems have to keep adapting as well just to keep up. According to the theory, animals who “stop running” go extinct.

So far our immune systems have largely retained the upper hand, but the fear is that given the current rate of disease emergence, the human race is losing the race.³¹⁵⁰ In a Scientific American article titled, “Will We Survive?,” one of the world’s leading immunologists writes:

Has the immune system, then, reached its apogee after the few hundred million years it had taken to develop? Can it respond in time to the new evolutionary challenges? These perfectly proper questions lack sure answers because we are in an utterly unprecedented situation [given the number of newly emerging infections].³¹⁵¹

The research team who wrote Beasts of the Earth conclude, “Considering that bacteria, viruses, and protozoa had a more than two-billion-year head start in this war, a victory by recently arrived Homo sapiens would be remarkable.”³¹⁵²

Lederberg ardently believes that emerging viruses may imperil human society itself. Says NIH medical epidemiologist David Morens,

When you look at the relationship between bugs and humans, the more important thing to look at is the bug. When an enterovirus like polio goes through the human gastrointestinal tract in three days, its genome mutates about two percent. That level of mutation—two percent of the genome—has taken the human species eight million years to accomplish. So who’s going to adapt to whom?

Pitted against that kind of competition, Lederberg concludes that the human evolutionary capacity to keep up “may be dismissed as almost totally inconsequential.”³¹⁵³ To help prevent the evolution of viruses as threatening as H5N1, the least we can do is take away a few billion feathered test tubes in which viruses can experiment, a few billion fewer spins at pandemic roulette.

The human species has existed in something like our present form for approximately 200,000 years. “Such a long run should itself give us confidence that our species will continue to survive, at least insofar as the microbial world is concerned. Yet such optimism,” wrote the Ehrlich prize-winning former chair of zoology at the University College of London, “might easily transmute into a tune whistled whilst passing a graveyard.”³¹⁵⁴