This rush of thoughts was not as clearly articulated as I have described them here. Rather, it felt like a half-formed idea engulfing my brain, like seeing an exam question that you know you can do but have not yet figured out. Or encountering a person you recognize in the street and searching your mind for her name. You know it’s coming. “It’s on the tip of my tongue!” my grandmother used to say (more and more as she got older, sadly). I was certain in that moment that the key to understanding lurking viruses was lodged in my subconscious, working its way toward somewhere else in my brain where I could put some form around it. I did have two concrete thoughts in the moment, however.
First, I had an example—admittedly hypothetical—that I would use repeatedly in the coming hours to make myself understandable. Imagine there is a venomous snake, I would tell the Chief of Staff and others. This snake leaves its hole in the ground in the day or night to hunt lizards, which it paralyzes with venom. But the danger of leaving the hole is that the snake exposes itself to predators, such as a hawk that can swoop down and grab the exposed serpent in its talons. There is a trade-off: the snake needs to hunt, but it exposes itself in doing so. This is standard Discovery Channel stuff.
Now let’s suppose that over the course of thousands of years, nature serves up a variation of that snake, a more “clever” species (if we are going to be anthropomorphic about it). This snake slithers into the hole of its prey, where scores of lizard eggs have just hatched. The “old” edition of this snake, the less “clever” one, would gobble up the baby lizards, enjoying one very fulfilling meal. Next week it will have to hunt all over again, once again exposing itself to all the predators aboveground. But the “clever” snake—again, somehow evolved over tens of thousands of years, maybe longer—finds a strategy that is nature’s equivalent of room service. Rather than eating the baby lizards in one glorious meal, the “clever” snake uses them to eat for a lifetime (or at least a couple of weeks); it holds them hostage, doing no harm as long as the adult lizards bring it food. This is nature’s equivalent of a guy who moves into your house, puts a gun to the dog’s head, and says, “No one gets hurt as long as you feed me well and do my laundry. Also, we’re going to need to order the premium cable channels.” (Remember, nature has no 911.) In my hypothetical “clever” snake example, both species derive an evolutionary advantage. The snake obviously benefits from getting fed without having to expose itself to predators; the lizards are also more successful as a species in the long run because: (1) the baby lizards do not get eaten; and (2) the snake interloper scares off other predators (e.g., other snakes).
As I have mentioned repeatedly, this example was entirely hypothetical. (When some jackass staffer at the National Security Council started asking me questions about whether lizards really live in holes, he was obviously missing the big picture.) The point is that I had developed a theory that could potentially explain the behavior of lurking viruses in a way that was entirely consistent with evolution. Why and how could the same virus live harmoniously with its host in some cases while causing serious illness or death in others? Perhaps it depends on whether the host is delivering what the virus needs to thrive. And if not… well, every once in a while you have to shoot a hostage to keep everyone in line. Or, in my hypothetical “clever” snake example, if the adult lizards stop bringing food, the baby lizards become dinner.
My second concrete thought as this amorphous theory surfaced in my brain was that I had to call Professor Huke. I was finally “thinking like a virus.” I was reasonably sure I had an answer worthy of one of his final exams, but I wanted to be sure before sending it up the scientific chain of command, let alone passing it along to the President of the United States. I found Huke’s home number in my phone and dialed. His wife answered promptly. “He’s off running errands,” she said.
“Do you have a sense of when he’ll be back?” I asked, trying to steer a path between urgency and rudeness.
“He was going to Home Depot, but usually that means he’s going to stop at the driving range,” she said. I remembered the driving range, a decrepit little place with mats and nets at the end of a huge strip mall (near the Home Depot). There was a soft-serve ice-cream cart in the parking lot that was popular with Dartmouth students.
“Does he carry a cell phone?” I asked.
“May I ask who’s calling?” she replied, more curious than suspicious. I apologized and explained as briefly as I could why I needed to reach her husband. “Oh, yes, you visited us,” she said. “Richard really enjoyed speaking with you. He does have a mobile phone, but I can see it right here on the dining room table. I keep telling him there’s no point in having a mobile phone if all he’s going to do is leave it at home.”
Huke called back about a half hour later. “I went to the driving range. The course opens this weekend,” he said, as if he needed to explain his whereabouts. “So how bad is this Capellaviridae?”
“Not terrible in the grand scheme of things,” I said truthfully. “It acts like a virulent strain of influenza.”
“That can be pretty bad,” he said.
“True, but the Dormigen gap is not that big. We’re only looking at about a week without it.”
“Yes, I’ve read about how they are trying to stretch out what they’ve got.”
“I’m calling because I want to bounce a hypothesis off of you,” I said. “A theory of how lurking viruses might work.”
“Very exciting! Okay, I’m listening,” he said. I explained the thoughts that had been percolating through my brain that morning, including the example of the venomous snake and the baby lizards. I also explained some of the patterns that Tie Guy had observed, such as the fact that Capellaviridae was most likely to turn virulent in areas where there had been the most aggressive efforts to eradicate the North American dust mite.
“That’s certainly enough to get you a plump research grant,” he answered, “but there are still a lot of things to be worked out, even if you’re right.” And then, after a moment: “How long do you have?”
“Days,” I said. “Not even a week.” Huke did not answer right away. His silence signaled the obvious: we needed years, or at least months, to turn this thought into anything practical—and even that assumed I was racing along the right track. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I continued. “When people become sick with the virulent form of Capellaviridae, we need to reintroduce them to the North American dust mite.”
“Hmm.” Huke was silent as he tried to follow my line of thinking. Eventually he said, “You are thinking that this dust mite fights back somehow, using Capellaviridae?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know how. Just that Capellaviridae turns virulent when the dust mite disappears,” he said.
“Yes. Either because the dust mite gets exterminated, or because people move from an area where the dust mite is endemic to a place where it’s not. In both cases, when there are no North American dust mites, the virus can turn virulent.”