Exiled from their La. labs, scientists assess their losses
NEW ORLEANS -- Hurricane Katrina devastated scientific research in this city, claiming thousands of laboratory animals, ruining valuable caches of tissue, and interrupting clinical experiments as patients scattered across the nation.
Research into treatments for epilepsy, hypertension, and obesity, as well as the development of vaccines, has been severely impeded by the storm. Restoring what has been lost could easily take years, researchers said.
Tulane University and the New Orleans medical campus of Louisiana State University are the engines that power research in the city, together garnering $132 million in ongoing federal grants. Researchers on the two campuses are recognized for their work in kidney disease, heart disease, cancer, and alcohol-related ailments.
The storm has made scientists such as Kyriakos Papadopoulos of Tulane exiles from their labs. He was among a large cadre of collaborators working on vaccines against possible bioterror agents.
Refrigerated compounds that Papadopoulos had are now useless. And, for some of his colleagues on the vaccine project, the loss will be even more profound.
''Can you imagine if you have human tissue or any kind of bacteria or fungi?" said Papadopoulos, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. ''It's going to be a total loss, with years of work destroyed and years of work replacing it ahead."
Scientists in Boston and other research hubs have opened their labs, and their homes, to displaced professors so they can attempt to restore their work on drugs and vaccines -- work that represents years of painstaking experimentation.
''The loss to the knowledge base is just huge," said Norka Ruiz Bravo, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health. ''There are a lot of unique resources that will not be reproduced, that have been lost forever."
The relief and rescue efforts for scientific enterprises are unfolding beyond the spotlight cast on campaigns to save human life and to secure a city in distress. But they involve a similar melding of governmental and private aid, extending from the NIH to individual researchers such as Tim Mitchison, a Harvard cell biologist offering to shelter two scientists in his Brookline home.
''This is a pretty profound disaster for these people, professionally and personally," said Mitchison, vice chairman of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
Scientific endeavors rely on electricity, water, and constant attention, much of which vanished with Katrina's arrival and the subsequent levee breaches. This week, science labs on the adjacent campuses of Tulane and Loyola in New Orleans's Uptown neighborhood sat dark, dank, and deserted.
In terms of total NIH grants, metro New Orleans research institutions rank 49th.
''Obviously, our research community has taken a major hit," said Bill Arceneaux, president of the Louisiana Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. ''We're going to do everything we can to maintain research data and equipment, but the challenges ahead are significant."
Papadopoulos camped out in his lab for four days, from the day before the storm began its assault until the day after the levees were breeched. He's bound for Columbia University in New York, where he has received an appointment as a visiting professor. It's not feasible, the professor said, to remove research materials every time a hurricane roars into the Gulf of Mexico.
''It takes a very long time to set up and take the chemicals out," Papadopoulos said. ''They're not going to do that for every scare. But this time was real."
Papadopoulos said that during his stay at Columbia, his research activities will be significantly truncated, largely limited to writing and reviewing scientific papers. His colleague Yunfeng Lu has already decamped to the University of New Mexico, where he completed his doctoral research.
Lu, who specializes in nanotechnology research, has taken with him a dozen postdoctoral fellows. But he was unable to recover material critical to his research: tiny particles 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
''Here we have to do everything from the beginning," Lu said Thursday in a telephone interview from Albuquerque. ''We have to remake a lot of material."
That will be true, too, in the 11 buildings on LSU's medical campus, where water stood 18 inches to 6 feet deep, said Joseph Moerschbaecher, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the health sciences center.
''Unfortunately, we lost all of our research animals," he said. ''And that has an enormous impact."
Some drowned, others were euthanized because they could not be removed. The casualties included mice, rabbits, dogs, and primates. Thousands of animals perished.
Researchers also lost troves of tissue samples kept in freezers at minus 70 degrees Celsius as the electricity and then generators stopped working. The loss of power also affected incubators used in other experiments.
''It's devastating," Moerschbaecher said.
On Wednesday, LSU scientists enlisted the aid of state troopers and National Guard forces to rescue time-sensitive scientific material from freezers, refrigerators, and incubators that lost power.
A team of three Louisiana State University scientists plunged into the flooded health sciences campus near the Superdome to retrieve cell culture lines swaddled in liquid nitrogen and just days away from worthlessness. Those cells were being used in experiments related to cancer, gene therapy, and heart disease.
''I'm waiting for those boys to come home," Moerschbaecher said.
LSU researchers from New Orleans have established bases on the university's main campus in Baton Rouge, as well as the University of Texas in San Antonio, the University of Iowa, and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
Those scientists as well as others in New Orleans who receive federal grants are being offered NIH assistance. Existing research projects will continue to be funded, and universities and hospitals may be eligible for supplemental aid to replace equipment and rebuild labs, Ruiz Bravo said.
