Dean's Message
Donald E. Wilson, MD, MACP,
The John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean

Why Research Matters
In May, at the grand opening of Health Sciences Facility II, a state-of-the-art biomedical research building at the University of Maryland Baltimore, NIH director Elias Zerhouni, MD, said that with both the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins located in Baltimore, the new motto for Baltimore ought to be “The city that heals.” I couldn’t agree more. However, before we can heal, we need to have the proper tools, and to have the proper tools we have to develop new knowledge through biomedical research.

In the early days of the human race, life was precarious due to predatory animals, famine, and infection. While few in our country today need fear the first two threats, there are a host of diseases, new and old, which threaten our health and well being. There are newly emerging pathogens—HIV, West Nile Virus, SARS—that require vaccines and cures that have not yet been developed. The post-September 11th world we live in has also made us rethink diseases once thought to be eradicated, such as smallpox, and those we hadn’t previously given much thought to, such as anthrax.

Multi-drug resistant bacteria—tuberculosis, staphylococcus (staph infections)—have become more widespread than ever. Such bacteria mutate and develop mechanisms to cope with the presence of various antibiotics, making the antibiotics ineffective. Bacteria that cause pneumonia can be lethal killers if they become resistant to all available antibiotics.

With the warming of the environment, diseases that were once confined to tropical areas, such as dengue fever and malaria, are now more prevalent in the southern regions of our country. Diseases can now rapidly spread around the globe due to the large number of people traveling on airplanes. This makes the ability to isolate and contain these diseases much more difficult, perhaps impossible. An example is the spread of SARS from Asia to North America through airline travel.

Pollution has become a major threat to our health as well. In addition to the increased risk of asthma, lung and heart disease, the damage pollution causes to the atmosphere reduces our protection from the sun and increases our chances of skin cancer, a preventable disease affecting increasing numbers every year.

And I cannot neglect to mention the effect our more affluent lifestyle has on the health of our society. Too much food consumption and too little activity have led to the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. The National Institutes of Health reports that obesity kills more people each year than breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer and AIDS combined. Let me repeat that: obesity kills more people each year than breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer and AIDS combined.

All of these threats to our health threaten to undo the progress biomedical science has made in improving the human life span. It does no good for us to think that we are safe because only one in every 1000 people will become afflicted with a particular disease. If you or your loved one is that one, you’ll surely wish there were a treatment or cure. Research is the key to early diagnosis, cure and prevention.

We never know where discoveries will come from. In the 1970s, President Nixon declared a war on cancer. And while progress has certainly been made since then, we do not yet have a cure for cancer. Some might say that we lost the war, but that would be too narrow a view. Part of the research funded by the government was on retrovirus—research conducted by Bob Gallo, a superb scientist on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine—so when HIV came along, all that previous cancer research made it possible to identify a causative agent and provide a diagnostic test for HIV to protect the blood supply, saving untold numbers, perhaps millions, of lives.

So research matters to you, to me, to our families, to our friends. Each of us has the responsibility to do all we can to make sure that research continues and thrives, and that the knowledge produced is translated into new tests, new medicines, and new cures. Each of us can help by supporting the use of tax dollars to fund research, by participating in clinical trials to test new approaches and interventions, and by keeping ourselves informed; so that we can benefit from the fruits of that research. 

The above is a reprint of a guest column printed in the September 12, 2003, Baltimore Business Journal.