[Department of Health and Human Services. CDC.] [A Centers for Disease Control Production] [in cooperation with: The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene] [Workers in Tropical Medicine] [Wilbur G. Downs, M.D. Clinical Professor of Epidemiology. Yale Arbovirus Research Unit] [Interviewed by: Thomas H. G. Aitken, Ph.D. Senior Research Assoc. in Epidemiology. Yale Arbovirus Research Unit] Dr. Aitken: Well, it's a pleasure to be with you here today, and I might start out by saying we've known each other for some 35 years. It's been a good, long time. Perhaps you'd like to start out and say something about your early boyhood. Dr. Downs: Well, growing up in several different places in West Virginia, I recall that when I was a very small boy, finding a salamander on a hot day and putting him in the icebox on a block of ice because I thought he'd be more comfortable there. This pretty well immobilized the salamander, one of the first little physiological experiments with cold-blooded vertebrates. Later when we were living in Niagara Falls, I became much interested in birds and the old National Geographic books of birds that many people will recall was a prime stimulus in that area. Then through family misfortune, namely tuberculosis in my father, the whole family of us, my brothers and sisters and myself, and my mother, moved to Saranac Lake. [Image of Dr. Downs' family when he was a boy.] This was family misfortune, but for me it was a wonderful opportunity for me to get into the life of the outdoors, including hunting, fishing, birding, and entomological work. [Image of a Dr. Downs as a young man, holding up in his right hand a fish he has caught.] When I went to Cornell, then, I might well have become a biologist, but my father, being a chemist, was strongly of the mind that all of his four sons would enter this field. None of us did, but I started out as a B. Chem at Cornell, started sneaking in courses in medical entomology, ornithology, and things like that. And in due course got into the pre-medical line and went on to a medical career. Dr. Aitken: I recall your telling me once that, I think you must have still been in high school, your father gave you a book concerning leprosy. Dr. Downs: Well, this was a chemical rubber company publication, I can't recall the title, but it had a chapter in it about chaulmoogra oil and the treatment of leprosy. I read this with great fascination and not very much comprehension, but was really turned on by the conclusions of this article that they didn't really know whether the chalmoogra oil was having any effect on the leprosy or not. Dr. Aitken: Yes. Dr. Downs: And this was more or less my first encounter with the area which has continuously fascinated me since, that not all is known, even by scientists, about the scientific subjects with which they are working. I have become more convinced of that position as the years go on. Dr. Aitken: I believe during your medical school career, one summer you took advantage of an opportunity and made a trip to Cuba with a good friend of both of ours, Gus Dammin. Do you recall that? Dr. Downs: That's right, Dr. Morton Cohn, Professor of Public Health at Cornell, had established some sort of a contact with Fulgencio Bautista, then then-dictator of Cuba. And arrangements were made for four Cornell medical students to go down for the summer and work with Dr. Pedro Kouri and Dr. Jose Basnuevo in parasitology and clinical ward work with parasitic diseases. [Image of six men in suits and ties seated at a white tablecloth-draped round table with bowls of soup in front of each man.] And there was Gus Dammin, Stuart Sanger, the son of Margaret Sanger, and Jack Hunter, and we had quite an exciting experience in Cuba for that summer. [Same photo of six men, each identified by surname.] Dr. Aitken: I'm sure you did. On your return, that following year, one of your professors was Walsh McDermott, who introduced you to the world of syphilology and other diseases. Dr. Downs: Well, after I finished medical school, I did a year's routine general service work and then went into the infectious disease/syphilis work, with full intention of having that become a career. [Image: Walsh McDermott] And that was under Dr. Walsh McDermott and Dr. Bruce Webster. That led, in due course, to the treatment of central nervous system syphilis cases with malaria. And that led to an association with Lowell Coggeshall, who was just across the street from New York Hospital, working in the Rockefeller Foundation laboratories, then located in the Rockefeller Institute buildings, the north building. And I became a sort of a transport boy between the syphilis/malaria service in New York Hospital and Coggeshall, who was an eager recipient of blood specimens containing the malaria parasite. [Image: Lowell T. Coggeshall, The Rockefeller Institute, 1936.] And in the course of this acquaintance, one day, Coggie, as he was known to all, said "What are you going to do with your life? and I said, "Well, I don't really know. It's going along very nicely, thank you." This is immediately pre-war, where matters were taken out of one's hands, arbitrarily, not [?]. And he said have you ever thought of joining an organization such as the Rockfeller Foundation? I said, such is farthest from my mind. I'd certainly never thought of that, I was overwhelmed by the idea. And he casually said well, why don't you go over and talk to Wilbur Sawyer, over in the foundation offices, then at 49 West 49th Street in New York. [Image of Wilbur A. Sawyer, Dir. of IHD, Rockefeller Foundation, 1935-1944.] So I did. Sawyer said "Why should we take you on?" and I said I don't really know... He said suppose we arrange a deal. We'll send you, for a year, to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, with no commitment on our part and no commitment on your part. At the end of that year we both have the privilege, open option on what we might want to do. So I said fine. Not long thereafter I advised Dr. Sawyer that I had become engaged to be married to Miss Helen Hartley Geer of New York City. And Sawyer smiled that quiet smile of his and said you know, that's not the first time that has happened. Few of you may realize that at that particular phase in American medical school education, very few members, if any, of a given medical class, were married. And very few even got married in their internship or residency years, because you got no pay and so on, and money just wasn't around. So, I went to Hopkins and at the end of that time, including very interesting study periods with Lloyd Rozeboom for example, [Image of two men, with a smaller photo of a third man inset between the two. 1980s, Lloyd Rozeboom, Recipient 1943, Bailey K. Ashford Award.] And Cort, and others in the school, Maxie in epidemiology, and Lowell Reed anad Maggie Merrill in biostatistics, went, opted for the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in turn graciously consented to have me join the staff. [Image: W.W. Cort, 1954.] Dr. Aitken: You were telling me last night, as I recall now, doing your MPH thesis on blood study, which so aroused the interest of certain people that it came to the attention of one of the professors over in the medical school. Dr. Downs: Well, the hematologists at Hopkins got interested in the approach I had taken toward this regeneration of red blood cells in pernicious anemia cases and asked me to sign off from the Rockefeller Foundation and join him. [Both laugh] Dr. Aitken: Well, I'm glad you didn't. Dr. Downs: I didn't fall for that one. Dr. Aitken: Then you had a brief spell, visit down to Florida to see Mark Boyd at his... Dr. Downs: Well, this was after I joined the Foundation staff... Dr. Aitken: Right. Dr. Downs: And was immediately assigned, as so many staff members were, new staff members, to the malaria field, malaria field training station, field and laboratory training station in Tallahassee, then run by Dr. Boyd. And I had a very action-filled learning experience there, rapidly going over the fundamentals of malaria with Boyd and Stuart Kitchen who was there then. Immediately following that went on assignment to Trinidad, with Dr. Boyd, and he worked with me for the first month or month and a half, getting a field malaria program started. Then Boyd departed and I was left on my own. Shannon, Ray Shannon was seconded to the program by the Rockefeller Foundation, an exceedingly fruitful association. Shannon aroused an already considerable interest in medical entomology, and got it into much broader fields of Diptera in general. And got me interested, one of the things he said one day was, the sarcophagidi haven't been very well-studied in the tropics. And this resulted in my developing a hobby interest in sarcophagidi that lasted for quite a number of years. Dr. Aitken: Yes, you amassed quite a collection of those flies, didn't you? Dr. Downs: I later gave them to the Peabody Museum at Yale University, where they stand awaiting further work. Dr. Aitken: Well, that period of your life in Trinidad between 1940 and '42 when you were doing the malaria reconnaisance of Trinidad and Tobago, that study, with Ray Shannon and Colin Pittendrigh and Horace Gillette, that was really a classical study in malaria epidemiology, and perhaps you'd like to talk about that a bit. Because I think that was one of the finest things that you did. Dr. Downs: Well, it was a classical study. It was possibly, with the limited people at hand, it possibly was about as wide-reaching as any studies that I know about. Namely, we had a malaria treatment service going in the colonial hospital in St. Ann's, the mental hospital, using Falciparum as the parasite. And studying the various malaria vectors in Trinidad, or suspect vectors, with actual infection rates in people...a field program that embraced a considerable botanical aspect which Colin Pittendrigh, who joined the program, developed and brought to quite full fruition, and a survey, well, a vector distribution in general, and then a malaria survey in Trinidad and Tobago of the school populations. Dr. Aitken: You say botanists. Why botany in malaria? Dr. Downs: Well, this was this problem of the Curtisia, a subgroup of Anopheles mosquitos which breed, essentially, exclusively in bromeliads and for which there was a special problem in Trinidad, because they had planted Immortel trees to shade cocoa and Immortel trees were wonderful hosts for a variety of bromeliad plants, and literally magnified the anophelene population to a very high level. Such that the heavy cocoa breeding, growing areas of Trinidad became areas of malaria hyper-endemicity. Regions around Sangre Grand, Cumuto, Tabaquite etc. in central Trinidad. Dr. Aitken: Now, your studies actually were, on the bromeliad malaria, were built on some earlier work that Dr. Rozeboom and Laird had done, just actually a few months before you arrived, isn't that right? Dr. Downs: Actually, we overlapped. They had been sent down on an Army contract because the Army was actively building bases in Trinidad at the time of the lend-lease arrangements, just prior to World War Two. And indeed, I think that some of the Rockefeller interest in getting going in Trinidad was also stimulated by pressures possibly developing out of the early wartime pressures that resulted in a more long-term program than the Army had been contemplating with Rozeboom and Laird. And they were there only for several months, and did a very effective job. But their work in turn was built upon work of DeVerti [?] and Urich, an observation of these earlier Trinidad-based people. Dr. Aitken: LaSalle and others? Dr. Downs: LaSalle, yes. Quite so. Dr. Aitken: Now, there was a fourth member of your group, namely Horace Gillette, who was a Guyanese. Dr. Downs: Yes. Dr. Aitken: But Chinese... Dr. Downs: Of Chinese origin. Horace Primrose Smith Gillette. And he, I should say Gillette [pronounced with a hard g] because that's the way he pronounced it. And he was with the then-colonial medical service, which had outreach to all of the islands. And he was relieved from service in St. Lucia where he was the district medical officer, to join the malaria program in Trinidad, and was a wonderfully experienced worker in the West Indian scene, and in due course, after the Rockefeller Foundation participation in the scheme terminated, developed the program that later resulted, with WHO participation, in the eradication of malaria from Trinidad and Tobago. Dr. Aitken: Well, that was a most intereseting period in your life. And that terminated when you were called up by the Army in 1942. What happened then? [Image: Dr. Downs with his wife and baby.] Dr. Downs: Well, I was, I had been in the Army reserves and I had deferment from active service because of the Trinidad service, which in turn, as I mentioned, was associated with Army activities to a considerable degree. After Pearl Harbor they arbitrarily cancelled the Rockefeller Foundation program assignment and I joined the United States Army, the A. U. S. and was put in charge of the malaria and venereal disease control programs of the Trinidad sector in base command. [Image: Downs with three fellow soldiers.] Which position I held for a relatively short period of time before the Army snatched me away from there and sent me out to the south Pacific to work with the malaria control activities in connection with the Solomon Islands campaign. [Image of Downs peering at an open book with two other soldiers seated at a table laden with bottles, jars, and a microscope.] Dr. Aitken: How long were you working in the Solomons, in that area? Dr. Downs: Oh, from about February 1943, no, February of 1942 on through July or August of 1943, successively being at Efate in the New Hebrides, at Guadalcanal, in the Russell Islands, New Georgia, Rendova, and Bougainville. [Image: Downs and two other soldiers seated in an Army jeep.] Dr. Aitken: But then at that point you were switched over to, was it NAMRU-3? Dr. Downs: I was reassigned to the United States temporarily and signed on to the NAMRU-2, the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit number two, where I was General Bayne-Jones's representative from the Surgeon General's office, as liaison officer with NAMRU-2, which was then under Captain, later Commodore, Rivers, Tom Rivers. And went with them to Guam, and later went with the sub-attachment of NAMRU-2 that went up to Okinawa in connection with the Okinawa campaign. [Image of American soldiers in a room with several Japanese civilians, adults and children.] Dr. Aitken: Who were some of the other officers associated with you at NAMRU-2? Dr. Downs: Well, Dick Shope was a cherished associate. His son Bob Shope, of course, is now the director of the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit laboratory, and there was Francis, Sergeant Cheever...Zimmerman, Harry Zimmerman. There were a number of others. Dr. Aitken: Lou Thomas... Dr. Downs: Lou Thomas. Dr. Aitken: Sieverton...[?] Dr. Downs: Jerome Sieverton...[?] Dr. Aitken: Oh, and my friend Bill Reeves of course. Dr. Downs: Well, Bill Reeves was not with NAMRU-2, but he showed up in Okinawa in connection with the Japanese encephalitis outbreak that occurred there in the terminal months of the war. Dr. Aitken: Now, you were telling me something about the NAMRU mission, what you were preparing for, and what happened when you actually got to Okinawa in terms of your preparations. Dr. Downs: Well, that mission, the little subgroup that was sent to Okinawa, remains in my mind one of the most significant episodes in military preventive medicine history. As significant in the sense of the whole structure of operations that it succeeded in altering. There was not much knowledge of what was on Okinawa. Malaria might be rampant. Schistosomiasis might be rampant, scrub typhus might be rampant. And in preparation for this, all troops going into Okinawa went in under full then-Atabrine suppression, later changed to Paraquin. Went in under full schistosomiasis precautionary rules that had developed from the Philippines campaign, and went in under full scrub typhus preventive rules, which meant that all uniforms, bedding, everything connected with the soldiers got an impregnation with dimethyl phthalate as a mite repellent. Well, when our unit went in, the NAMRU unit went in, with people specializing in each of those areas, and it was rather speedily determined, right in the midst of combat conditions, that one, malaria in the southern area of Okinawa, which was the most intensely fought-over area, was indeed a very minor problem. That was my responsibility to determine. Shope was given schistosomiasis, interestingly enough, because he was a famous virologist at that time. [Image: Richard E. Shope, Okinawa, 1945.] And it was speedily determined, Shope and Hardcastle and a couple of other people working on that, that schistosomiasis could be forgotten about, as far as a potent military risk was concerned. One of the officers, I think it was Cheever, worked on the scrub typhus area, and he showed that that, in turn, was a minor problem. The intense Army disciplinary and operational things connected with these three diseases could be relaxed quite completely, which meant that other phases of military operations could proceed without the impedence of a heavy preventive medicine mode. So it was in effect a negative feed-in, but a feed-in that tremendously altered the course of the military operations. And indeed, we did not develop statistics in these areas to show that we had made a mistake. However, filariasis did show up as a very prevalent problem on Okinawa, unanticipated, but actually not threatening troop mobility and health immediately at least. And of course Japanese encephalitis turned up in due course...and was not really anticipated, but steps were taken to get Japanese encephalitis preventive measures in. That's where Hammond and Reeves came in, and later Albert Sabin came over with some vaccine from the Walter Reed center in Washington. Dr. Aitken: Now wasn't there a story about your being seen driving along in a Jeep, fast asleep, in the midst of fighting going on all around and people were saying, there's a man who's completely oblivious to what's happening in this war... Dr. Downs: Well, there is such a story... [Dr. Aitken laughs] I think Dick Shope has long been famous for his abilities as a raconteur, rather spread that story in an exaggerated form. Dr. Aitken: Bob Shope was telling me about it the other day. Well, the war ended and you came back to this country to rejoin the Rockefeller Foundation, and it was... Actually, that was, when you came back, you went on a little survey trip to Trinidad and Venezuela and Colombia, and you came back to the New York office of the Rockefeller Foundation, to a board meeting I believe, of the international health division, where you reported on your findings. I had just joined the foundation and happened to be in New York at the time and listened to your report. And that's where our lives commenced, so to speak. And from there you went to Mexico, and that was another interesting period in your life. Dr. Downs: Well, that little circuit that the foundation sent me on had some interesting contact points. I went to Venezuela, where of course...well, I went with Dr. Porter Crawford, who was in charge of that area's work, Venezuela, Colombia, etc., based out of Havana. And we visited Gabaldon in Venezuela and saw Maracaibo and some of the activities there. It was a strong possibility that I might be assigned there. Then we went on to Colombia and met up with Marston Bates in Villavicencio and had a marvelous several days tour of the Villavicencio area, [Image of Marston Bates and Mrs. Bates, Villavicencio, Colombia, 1932.] meeting Marston Bates and Jorge [?] and getting out into those fascinating eastern Andean slope rainforests that are in that region. Actually, in due course, Paul Russell and John Myer got assigned to Venezuela and I was assigned to Mexico, which I had never been to, to get into a malaria program and a community health program in Mexico in 1946. [Image: Lewis Hackett, Rockefeller Foundation, Mexico, 1947.] Dr. Aitken: You succeeded George Payne. Dr. Downs: Right. Dr. Aitken: And what was the work in Mexico? Dr. Downs: Well, George Payne had a community health project going on in a half a dozen Mexican communities, in collaboration with state health departments of various states. Cuernavaca, Morelos, Amecameca in the state of Mexico, Puebla in the state of Puebla, Tula in the state of Hidalgo, and Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. In addition, he had this program going in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. James [Gayen?] in Temisco, in Acatlipa, in Morelos, early studies on residual spraying of DDT, [Image: Acatlipa, Mexico, 1948.] which had been prefaced by preliminary malaria reconnaissance survey for incidence and vector density and so on... Anopheles [?] the vector in that region. Those studies...I rather phased out the community health projects over the period of four or five years, and got more and more involved with the malaria studies. [Image: Russell, Coatney, Downs, Mexico 1950.] With the very able assistance of Senor [?] Borjas, a talented Spanish refugee then in Mexico, who was to a very considerable degree responsible for elaborating the studies on the degradation of DDT into non-toxic compounds, as far as mosquitoes were concerned, by different soils and muds of the various adobes in Mexico. Showuing that in some regions DDT was inactivated almost as rapidly as it was put on -- that's a slight exaggeration -- in other regions it persisted for years. And in turn it was determined that this was a function most primarily of the ferric oxide content of the various muds of the various regions. Dr. Aitken: Who were some of your other Mexican associates at that time? Dr. Downs: Well, we had a program going on malaria therapy. I never could resist getting drawn into that area, at the Instituto de Salubridad y Enfermedades Tropicales with Gerardo Varela's consent. Varela was the director of the Institute. And Dr. Armando Sandoval's direct participation. Sandoval became the Mexican arm in connection with the management of these patients. And we were trying to infect Anopheles aztecas, albimanus, and pseudopunctipennis in connection with vector susceptibility studies. Dr. Aitken: But to undertake such studies it required having colonies of Anopheles, didn't it? Dr. Downs: Well, we were able to establish colonies of aztecas. Dr. Aitken: This was something novel... Dr. Downs: That was a new thing for aztecas, and we were able to establish a colony of albimanus, with the, again, talented work of an experienced, but not formally trained Mexican, Artemio Arismendi, who simply had a gardener's green thumb for growing Anopheles. But try as we could, and we tried and tried repeatedly, we were unable to colonize pseudopunctipennis successfully. That experience I think has been repeated by others elsewhere, namely the lack of a... Dr. Aitken: Well, I think eventually one of my old friends from Berkeley, Hardeman, established a colony of pseudopunctipennis. It may have been one of the California strains. Dr. Downs: One might imagine, in such connection for example, that one might get a strain colonized from somewhere in the distributional stretch of pseudopunctipennis, which stretches from California to Chile if I'm not mistaken. Dr. Aitken: And northern Argentina. Dr. Downs: And northern Argentina. Much the same thing happened when Boyd was first establishing quadramaculatus in Tallahassee, a story that always remained with me. He made various attempts to establish quadrimaculatus that were unsuccessful. Suddenly, without knowing the now-modern language, he got a clone from somewhere that colonized, and with that was able to establish and maintain a long, persistent colony. Dr. Aitken: You haven't mentioned Louis Vargas... Dr. Downs: Well, Louis Vargas was closely associated with us in the entomological areas of the program, and went on several fascinating field trips down into the backlands of Tabasco. And of course in the Tamisco and Acatlipa areas, and Vargas later occupied a very prominent role in the malaria eradication program that was developed for Mexico in the period after I had departed from Mexico. I left there in 1952. Dr. Aitken: And then began another career, so to speak, in Trinidad. And this is where our paths crossed again for a more permanent period. Well, you went to Trinidad in 1952 to establish the Trinidad Regional Virus Laboratory, as it was called in British Trinidad of those days. And that was an interesting period. Dr. Downs: Well, the foundation gave me a decision at the time of the Mexico deal. They decided to get out of malaria, with the obvious facts that USAID in the regional area, and WHO were distinctly getting interested in malaria eradication, with a good deal of push by Fred Soper behind all of this. [Two images of Fred L. Soper, RF, Colombia PAHO: 1938 and 1970.] And it began to become evident that the minor financial contributions and professional contributions of the Rockefeller Foundation would be completely inundated by these rather massive developments. And they said well, if you want to keep on with malaria, which was a very tempting thing, I really loved malaria work...you can leave us and I'm sure that you can find a job somewhere. Or, if you want to switch over to virus work, we are starting a virus program. So I decided I would stick with the Rockefeller Foundation, a decision which I have not regretted, but sometimes I think somewhat ruefully about some of the later developments, both in malaria and in virology. Dr. Aitken: Why viruses? [Image: Workers loading truck with supplies; truck says Trinidad Regional Virus Laboratory on the side.] Dr. Downs: Well, the Rockefeller Foundation, through its international health division, had decided that this little extra to their yellow fever programs of preceding decades, the extra being a series of viruses, not many, half a dozen plus minus, picked up in South America and Africa. Viruses such as Anopheles A, Anopheles B, [?], West Nile, some [?], might be interesting topics around which to build a program of exploration and to see how many viruses there might be transmitted by vectors. A term that later grew into arboviruses, arthropod-borne viruses. And one may say in very brief summary that indeed the total of 1950, when this program was first conceived, the total of 19 known viruses, including the various equine encephalitis and so on, that might fall into this field, has now magnified to the latest figure of four hundred and forty, a rather overwhelming total. Not all of this resulted directly from Rockefeller Foundation participation, to be sure, because there were many other local governments, US Army, US Navy, and other public health service, universities, in this country and around the world, that had inputs into this total, which now has become a rather huge total. Dr. Aitken: Towards the, well it wasn't towards the end of your stay in Trinidad during that period, but nearing the end, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to get together a number of virologists interested in this whole field and talk things over, and this was the Gould House meeting. Dr. Downs: Dr. Robert Morrison and Max Tyler and who else I don't know, decided that it would be a good idea to try to pull the strings together and have a meeting of various interested people, and this Gould House meeting was celebrated. And it resulted directly, with some Rockefeller Foundation financial backing to get it off to a good start, in what is now known as the American Committee for Arthropod-Borne viruses, the ACAV. [Image: Richard M. Taylor, East Africa, 1953.] Which in turn, with Dick Taylor's masterminding of the Catalog of Arthropod-Borne Viruses, and the participation, later participation of Roy Chamberlin, Nick Karabatsos has resulted in an ongoing virus cataloging and literature cataloging activity. Dr. Aitken: Trigby... Dr. Downs: Trigby [?] was prominent in that development and other areas that covered epidemiology information exchange with Telford Work being a very active developer of the information exchange. [Telford H. Work, India, 1955] Roy Chamberlin also being very heavily involved in this. Dr. Aitken: Well, it's resulted in the fact that every year now, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, that there is a special session carried on by the ACAV to talk about arboviruses. In fact, there's a little jealousy sometimes in the ASTM and H about the fact that it looks like the ACAV activity may take over the ASTM and H. Dr. Downs: Well, that question awaits some further resolution, I must say. Dr. Aitken: Well, certainly, our experiences together in Trinidad were fascinating ones, and we had some wonderful colleagues in Charles Anderson and Leslie Spence and others. [Image: Leslie Spence, Trinidad Regional Virus Lab. 1963. Four men standing, four men sitting, with yellow arrow pointing at seated man on far right.] And many viruses were, many new to science were recovered from nature, 35 I believe or some figure like that. Dr. Downs: In Trinidad itself? Dr. Aitken: Yes. Dr. Downs: Quite so. Not to mention what the group working in Belem dished in, and the group working in Poona, and the group working in Johannesburg, and the group working at Ibaden. In fact, it's quite a total. I haven't really gotten together to try to dissect out this four hundred and forty, and find out how many came directly from RF, then how many came from laboratories which received considerable and very necessary early financial support from RF. As compared to laboratories, those laboratories which worked entirely independently, as it were, fully aware but entirely independent of RF support. Such as various U.S. Army, Navy, Public Health Service activities, some of the university groups, not all, and a number of the foreign groups, but not all, because a number of foreign laboratories received direct support. Dr. Aitken: Well certainly those laboratories which were fortunate, if I can use that expression, of operating in the tropics, had the edge on the others, because the tropics being what they are, there is a wealth of viruses existing in the tropics. Dr. Downs: We had an ardent resister of this statement, namely Harald Johnson, working in California. [Image: Harald N. Johnson, 1973. Older man wearing a hat, yellow shirt, and brown bandanna around his neck, leaning on a walking stick as he makes his way through a desert scrub-type landscape.] With the California State Health Department, Johnson was a Rockefeller Foundation employee, and he wanted to have it that the viruses arose from a northern focus and gradually disseminated over the world. Well, he may, in certain respects...the radiation post-glacial, for example, of all sorts of life forms, from the embattled narrow fringe into the broad spread as more northern lands became accessible to colonization by all sorts of creatures, indeed, the two had an interplay, but that question is not resolved. What I'd like to do for a moment, actually, since you brought up this question of individuals, is to attempt to communicate my own feeling of indebtedness to a series of inspiring and talented individuals who not only definitely influenced me in development of various interests, but also without whose contributions, etc., I would certainly have been groping in the dark a good deal of the time. And among these people, starting early, would be people such as Robert Matheson at Cornell, from whom I took my first course in medical entomology. People on the New York State Biological Survey, biologists for whom I worked for three summers in [?] surveys in New York State. [Image: New York State Biological Survey, 1935. Seven men standing in front of a tent-like structure.] Dr. Walsh McDermott at New York Hospital, who was certainly an inspiring teacher, as well as Dr. John Dietrick of the Cornell group, who was an inspiring clinician, one who could reach medical students and get them to open their eyes to what was not known, in addition to what was known. Moving on, into the association in Tallahassee with Dr. Mark Boyd, who was a bit testy sometimes, but certainly a very knowledgeable and very effective teacher of the malaria picture, in many aspects of it. Dr. Aitken: Don't forget Rolla Hill, Dr. Downs: Rolla Hill, who influenced me in Saranac Lake when I would come back. He and his wife were in Saranac Lake and I had a chance to talk over malaria with him, and Rolla of course had done some outstanding malaria studies in Aves de Moura in Portugal. One of which was a longitudinal study of a population group followed with repeated blood smears over the period of a year and a half or so, and showing clearly that these people weren't just infected with malaria, they were infected with all of the malarias of the region. All of the people with all of the malarias, sort of a super-saturation, 300 percent malaria instead of 100 percent malaria. Dr. Aitken: But what did he, he asked you why had you joined the Rockefeller Foundation... Dr. Downs: Well, he asked me that question with a sort of a smile on his face and I said I had a desire to do good, sort of like the Rockerfeller Foundation motto. [Both laugh] And some years later I met Rolla, after the war and some shaking down and he said, are you still wanting to do good? And I thought that was a question bespeaking a great deal of wisdom, accumulated wisdom, on his part. Well, other inspiring contacts were Ray Shannon in Trinidad. [Image: Head shot, Raymond C. Shannon, 1929.] Horace Gillette in Trinidad, and Colin Pittendrigh in Trinidad. Pittendrigh who later went on to a distinguished career in the circadian rhythm area and is now the director of the marine biological institute associated with Stanford University. Dr. Aitken: Pacific Grove. Dr. Downs: Pacific Grove, California. Other inspiring contacts at a later stage, after Trinidad, were, well, Eulogio Bordas in Mexico, in the post-war years, and then in the Trinidad years the very fortunate business of having Charles Anderson working with me [Image: Head shot, Charles R. Anderson, 1960s.] to establish the Trinidad Regional Virus laboratory. I was in charge, whyme and not Andy I don't know, because Andy was the man who knew the virology and knew laboratory organization. And he is the man to whom full credit should be given in connection with the working up of that lab into operating shape. Then there was Leslie Spence, the talented young St. Vincentian, working for the Trinidad Health Department, who was assigned to us by government. [Image: Two men standing in front of clapboard building with sign reading Trinidad Regional Virus Laboratory, Office Entrance. Spence and Aitken, 1956.] And who has gone on himself to a distinguished career in medical microbiology, now the chairman of the department, I believe, at the University of Toronto Medical Centre in Toronto. Other inspiring people in the west Indian area, Louis Grant in Jamaica and Ed Bell from Guyana, then British Guyana, both of whom have gone on to high-level careers in microbiology. Dr. Aitken: And there was a British friend, David Snow. Dr. Downs: Well, David Snow, yes, Tommy is reminding me of areas...the bird interest that I earlier mentioned, of course, translates over directly into arbovirus work with its attention being given to birds, mammals, insects, human beings, and we had a very fortunate association with David Snow, now the curator of birds at the British Museum. Who was then in Trinidad and who joined in gleefully in a program of doing studies of nestling birds, particularly, in Trinidad. The side channel was also the study of the oil birds in the oil-bird cage in Trinidad, not so directly virus-associated. Dr. Aitken: Well, from Trinidad you were recalled to New York to take over the international aspects of the foundation's program. And that was, in a way a sad time, because it wasn't too long before things started being curtailed, the whole program... Dr. Downs: Well, Dr. Hugh Smith and Dr. Robert Morrison had been inspiring directors of this arbovirus effort in the first place. The effort was conceived by the Rockefeller Foundation in chracteristic, in their characteristic style, as something that was going to have a finite lifespan. They did not anticipate its hanging on forever, and by the time I got recalled to New York to take over this program, it was already made clear by them that this was not going to be a phase of continuing expansion, but a phase of gradual retraction. So it became my sad duty, over the period of a decade, to close out or more literally, to transfer, the direction of these laboratories completely into the hands of the local governments, and to one-by- one remove and often terminate various of the Rockefeller Foundation staff members who had contributed so tremendously to the programs. Individuals such as Charles Anderson, Telford Work, Bob Kokernot... Dr. Aitken: Trapido Dr. Downs: Harold Trapido, Don Carey, the Causeys. Some of these came up for retirement in due course, others opted to change of their own. [Image of seven people in a lab, some identified: Donald E. Carey, Calista Causey, Ottis Causey. Ibaden 1968.] Vernon Lee, there are [?] Yonkers, Ron Mackenzie, the list is a long one. Dr. Aitken: Brooke Worth. [Image: man on bicycle. C. Brooke Worth, Ndume, Natal Province, 1959.] Dr. Downs: Brooke Worth, and I had some contretemps with the Rockefeller Foundation at that time, feeling that they were making a grave mistake in permitting some of these younger people who had demonstrated dedication to the work, ability to live under conditions of hardship, or at least of not complete U.S.-grade comfort in a number of countries, and to participate actively in programs overseas, with their wives and families...to have these people simply withdraw from the Rockefeller Foundation service, with the Rockefeller Foundation then having to go through a troublesome period of finding replacements. There's always an attrition when you try to find and keep people who will stick by one of these international programs. Dr. Aitken: One of the things that came out of all of this was the establishment of...the transfer of the New York laboratory of the RF to Yale, where it became the Yale Arborvirus Research Center. Dr. Downs: There's some interesting back history in this. The Rockefeller Foundation virus laboratories in New York were never the joyous co-sharers in the Rockefeller Institute. In fact there was a time in the history of the Rockefeller Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation when the Rockefeller Foundation virus laboratories definitely were not wanted there. And they operated there, they never paid rent. This was deemed inappropriate within two different and supposedly not competing Rockefeller interests, namely the Institute with financial backing in one budget and the Foundation in another. But actually, they paid a service charge, and by the time this service charge was getting up in the region of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, the Rockefeller Foundation people thought they could amortize this amount of money by financing the construction of an independent laboratory. They searched around the U.S. and Yale was selected upon for various reasons which I won't go into now, I don't know all of the reasons, and the whole Rockefeller Foundation laboratories in the north building of the Institute were then transferred in nineteen sixty.... Dr. Aitken: Was it '64? Dr. Downs: '64. The building was begun in '62, but the transfer was not made until the end of the year in '64 as I recall. Dr. Aitken: Yes, that's right. Dr. Downs: And the laboratory, with relatively little loss of personnel, was transferred up from New York to New Haven. Dr. Aitken: One of the highlights of that period was the discovery of so-called lassa fever. Dr. Downs: Well, many things in arbovirus work happened not immediately by planned direction but because there had been a program which permits this sort of thing to happen. Jordi Casals had incidentally, in a meeting, gotten in touch with John Frame, met John Frame, who was a doctor in New York who screened missionaries returning from Africa, for health reasons, and took blood specimens on them. And Casals said, oh they'd be glad to, we'd be glad to, at the YARU laboratories, the Yale Arborvirus Research Unit laboratories, to check out these specimens to see what they might have. So a contact was established with Frame. Then one day a very sick person was evacuated from Africa, namely Nurse Pinneo, and was hospitalized at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Frame called our laboratory. I went down to New York and picked up specimens, blood and pleural fluid, from this patient. Sonja Buckley and Jordi began work on these specimens in New York, in New Haven, and from this came lassa virus, which was then a new virus... [Image of three researchers, heads close together, examining a test tube. Jordi Casals, Sonja Buckley. Lassa fever.] And a very dangerous one, and one which rather led into a trail of further dangerous viruses in central Africa which had hitherto been unsuspected. Dr. Aitken: Well, that was an exciting and also sad period for the group working at YARU. Of course the lab has been involved in investigating various outbreaks over the years, and its close association with the medical school has resulted in staff members being affiliated with medical school activities. Now one of the things that came along that you initiated was the international program for student travel. Perhaps you'd like to say something about that. Dr. Downs: Well, this was a very interesting development. The Rockefeller Foundation originally gave us fifteen thousand dollars to help us at the Arbovirus Research Lab to pick up interesting students, get them some training, and get them to overseas laboratories for a little work experience. When that fifteen thousand dollars ran out, we encountered a donor who would put in some money, the university backed it, and we entered into a program which over the past fifteen years has resulted in 120, plus minus, medical students going overseas on any of various assignments: psychiatry, nutrition, virus work, bacteriology, community health services, etc. Things related to medicine...and it's my feeling that this has been a very significant thing for the medical school. A number of the students have gone on - a small but significant number of the students - have gone on to career work in international health. Dr. Aitken: Well, I think this has been a wonderful experience for young people. In a sense it's a reflection of your earlier experience when you went to Cuba during your medical school years. Well, thanks very much, Will, for an interesting and stimulating visit with you. [Workers in Tropical Medicine] [Wilbur G. Downs, M.D. Clinical Professor of Epidemiology. Yale Arbovirus Research Unit] [Interviewed by: Thomas H. G. Aitken, Ph.D. Senior Research Assoc. in Epidemiology, Yale Arbovirus Research Unit] [Produced by: Audiovisual Services Laboratory Improvement Program Office, Centers for Disease Control] [in cooperation with: the American Society of Tropic Medicine and Hygiene] [Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia]