Museum Links Evolutionary Biology and Human Health

Wednesday, June 09 6:22 pm

What does Darwin have to do with human disease? Quite a lot, it turns out, as the lessons of evolution, enhanced by sophisticated technologies such as gene sequencing, are being used to tease out the secrets of organisms that spread death and disability around the globe.

The American Museum of Natural History has taken a leading role in these efforts through ongoing collaborations between its evolutionary biologists and medical researchers to understand various threats to human health, from flu pandemics to malaria to the ravages of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

This work was highlighted at a Science Breakfast panel discussion held last week at the Museum before an audience of medical and science writers.

Listen to the Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hr 09 mins, 64 MB)

The panel included three curators from the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology who work under the auspices of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics. Rob DeSalle, who moderated, Mark Siddall, and Ward Wheeler were joined by three medical scientists: New York University School of Medicine’s Jane Carlton, Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Robert Burk, and Columbia University’s Paul Planet.

Museum scientists help medical researchers pin down the origin, evolution, and diversity of pathogens, and, perhaps most important, how they have adapted to us and we to them.

“Every doctor, whether they know it or not, is a natural historian,” said Planet, who studies infectious diseases in children and is also a research associate at the Museum.

Another key component of collaboration is the development of new tools to make sense of masses of raw data. Case in point: the Supramap, displayed by Wheeler, a powerful new computer application which allows researchers and public health officials to track the spread and mutation of a disease over time and place.

Of course, the ultimate goal of such supercomputing, genome-sequencing, and the building of evolutionary trees is to better predict pandemic outbreaks and to find better treatments, even cures.

Said Burk, who has worked with DeSalle on the molecular phylogeny of the human papillomavirus, which is linked to cervical cancer, for a decade:  ”From the medical perspective, I think it’s very clear that the better we understand the pathogenesis of any disease, the better we are able to intervene.”