University of Illinois

President // Speeches and Statements

ONE MEDICINE COLLOQUIUM
University of Illinois
January 9, 2007

Remarks by B. Joseph White, President


Thank you for the invitation to speak. Let me add my welcome to the One Medicine Colloquium and, for some of you, to the University of Illinois.

I trust you've had a productive day of discussion and a healthy interchange of ideas.

I know you’ve had a day of heavy lifting so maybe you won’t mind my starting on a light note.

My early interest in the animal-human interface came, of course, from our family dogs, whom I loved. But later, it was galvanized by a New Yorker cartoon I would never forget. It showed two pigeons in a cage, with a white-coated scientist hovering and observing them. And one pigeon says to the other, “Watch what I’ve taught him. Every time I push this lever with my beak, he makes sure a pellet drops into my bowl.”

Since then, I’ve never had total certainty about either the nature of cause and effect or animal / human relationships.

On the serious front, if I could only say one thing to you this evening, it is this: I think One Medicine is an inspired idea and the University of Illinois is the ideal center of gravity for it.

That assertion comes from my experience both as a dean and a faculty member. As a dean, I felt that the most important thing I did besides help recruit great faculty was to create structures that enabled faculty – business faculty in my case – to interact with faculty who had very different expertise but a shared focus on consequential problems. We partnered with the School of Natural Resources and Environment to develop interdisciplinary expertise in sustainability when that concept was new and marginal at best. With art and architecture to focus on design. With law and economics and engineering and medicine to focus on entrepreneurship. And so on.

My biggest thrill as a young faculty member was an appointment to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan where I worked with economists, social psychologists, statisticians and others different than me. My biggest thrill, and honor, as an older faculty member, came three years ago, when I was invited to be the only non-life-scientist at Michigan’s Life Sciences Institute. Working every day with biologists, chemists, and physicians of all kinds to figure out the implications of their research for the future of health care was intellectually challenging and utterly fascinating.

Make no mistake. I’m a big fan of what you are doing.

To me, the idea of veterinarians and physicians and public health experts and others working together to focus on vital matters of common interest – like zoonotic health challenges and global antimicrobial resistance and integrated biosurveillance, and many others is, as I said, inspired.

So that’s my message: Good going. And keep going. Most of the forces in the scientific, professional, and academic worlds push in the direction of ever greater specialization. By and large, this is good. But we senior people must, from time-to-time, through creativity and wisdom and persuasion and supporting smart young people, put things back together again – reintegrate – to get a new look at them. Multiple disciplines and professions. One Medicine. Great idea.

I want to personally thank John Hermann, clinical assistant professor, chief of the Food Animal Reproduction, Medicine and Surgery Section, and director of the DVM/MPH at the College of Veterinary Medicine for his write-up on this Colloquium on One Medicine that my son-in-law, who is a Vet Med student, sent me because I found it so informative and instructive. And I expect you’ve contributed a lot more than that write-up.

A Center for One Medicine is a timely proposal that plays to the U of I's strengths, both traditional and emerging.

Historically, there's a practical bent to the research land-grant universities undertake. Here at the University of Illinois, we've always not only educated generations of Illinois' sons and daughters, but we've brought science – including Nobel Prize winning science – to major societal challenges.

And aren’t we glad we did!

  • What if the U of I's Arthur Cutts Willard hadn't investigated the ventilation of long ducts that made possible the construction of such tubes as Manhattan's Holland Tunnel?
  • What if the U of I's John Bardeen, hadn’t collaborated with others to do research on semiconductors and discover the transistor effect, which won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956?
  • What if Mosaic hadn't been developed at the U of I?

This work and other like it at U of I literally changed our world.

This evening, I want to talk briefly about pets, ecosystems and pandemic diseases, food safety and agricultural production systems, as well as research by physicians, veterinarians and public health experts.

On the matter of One Medicine and pets:

Princeton's Laura Kahn, whom I believe is in attendance today, says straight out: "At the individual health level, zoonotic diseases are a concern for all who live and work with animals. This risk is especially problematic for persons, such as companion animal owners, who are immunocompromised."

She goes on to discuss the situation with HIV patients. Physicians are not comfortable discussing the role zoonosis could play and would prefer veterinarians weigh in with opinions

But most patients aren't comfortable with veterinarians as sources for information about their human health. Kahn cites a study that found that only 21 percent of HIV patients asked their veterinarians about the health risks of pet ownership.

A downside of our global village is the potential for pandemic zoonotic diseases. It arises from disruptions in local ecosystems and spreads rapidly to other areas. We are fortunate not yet to have had to deal with avian flu on a large scale in the U.S.

In 2006, there was not a single death due to avian flu in a developed nation. That's the assertion of William Dobson, the managing editor of "Foreign Policy Magazine" in an interview w/ Bob Edwards on XM satellite radio last week (12/29/06). Dobson went on to say there had been avian flu deaths in developing countries.

Dobson presented this information as "one of the great overlooked stories of the year." He ended by saying the threat hadn't gone away, that pandemics tend to be cyclical, and we're overdue. So we've been lucky so far.

My sense is that, even a year down the road, we are no more prepared for avian flu than we were for Hurricane Katrina. Some of you would know better than I; I hope I’m wrong.

In the U.S., unsafe food causes 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths a year. The safety of chicken and meat depends largely on a 100-year-old system of visual inspection by government workers staring at carcasses flying by on conveyer belts.

Obviously, food safety needs to be addressed long before meat reaches the processing plant for inspection, beginning with an agricultural production system that ensures the health and safety of animals on the farm.

About 50 Americans a year die of e coli. That doesn't sound like many compared to the 40,000 who annually die in auto crashes. What the two have in common is that no matter what we do, we cannot reduce e coli or auto-related deaths to zero. In both cases, the challenge is reducing risk.

There is a big trade-off in modern life: A global food-supply chain provides today's consumer with a variety of foods and nutrition our grandparents could not have dreamed of. But we have increased public vulnerability because food — so much of which comes from animals — can deliver substances that can sicken or kill large numbers of people. And we don't do enough substantive research on how to make our food supply safer.

In this and other areas, I am excited about the potentially life-saving advances possible in research collaboration among physicians, veterinarians and public-health experts.

We need more veterinary researchers and physician researchers and a higher profile for public health in our nation in these dangerous times.

At the University of Illinois we possess the breadth and depth of disciplinary strength across the range of disciplines to succeed in the kind of multidisciplinary work that a concept as large as One Medicine demands. In fact, few institutions can match us.

We have the Colleges of Veterinary Medicine; Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences; and Law, Education, and Medicine all here on the Urbana campus. And, we have the colleges of Medicine, Pharmacy and Public Health at our Chicago campus. University-wide we have our Institute of Government and Public Affairs.

I'll close by citing two big multidisciplinary U of I efforts that illustrate what we do well here and perhaps provide some perspective to the One Medicine effort.

First, stem cells. Last week I met with Eric Whitaker, an M.D. and M.P.H., director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, who is also the director of the Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute. That body is charged with administering the stem-cell research funds the governor made available this year.

So far, the institute has made $15 million in grants to universities and hospitals all over the state. Of that amount $7.54 million — more than half — came to researchers at our Chicago and Urbana campuses. Quite a performance.

Also interesting was the range of disciplines of our U of I researchers who received the grants. In no particular order:

  • Jasti Rao, UIC College of Medicine at Peoria: Biomedical and therapeutic science
  • Larry Schook, Urbana: Animal Sciences
  • Dengping Yin, UIC: Pediatric invasive surgery
  • Matthew Stewart, Urbana: Veterinary clinical medicine
  • Fei Wang, Urbana: Cell and structural biology
  • George H. DeVries, UIC: Anatomy and cell biology
  • Ronald Hoffman, UIC: Hematology/Oncology
  • Stephen Kaufman, Urbana: Medical, cell and structural biology
  • Matthew Wheeler, Urbana: Animal sciences

The range of possible uses and cures stem cells offer is so broad as to attract a large number of research disciplines. The point is that we at the U of I can bring so many disciplinary views to solve big problems that don't arrange themselves neatly along disciplinary lines.

Second, bees. Bees made quite a buzz on the Urbana campus last fall. The buzz was coming from news reports from all over the world. And from bee research all over campus.

The Oct. 19 Washington Post quoted entomology professor Gene Robinson: "The honeybee industry is at a critical juncture. The time for action is now."

Robinson was a researcher in the National Research Council Panel study that made the findings. His U of I colleague May Berenbaum chaired the panel.

The article went on to report on the 30 percent decline over 20 years in American honeybees. That's economically serious because bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the U.S. with an annual value of $10-20 billion.

While bats, butterflies and the wind contribute to pollination, bees are the wings-down pollination champs. Take the California almond crop. It requires 1.2 million bee hives to pollinate the 1.5 billion pound annual crop. That's 80 percent of the world's almond supply with a yearly value of $2.5 billion.

Gene Robinson, you may know, is a star. He directs the U of I Bee Research Facility and works on the bee genome project.

But he's not the prototypical solitary researcher.

Fellow entomologist Hugh Robertson works on the bee genome, too.

Computer scientist Saurabh Sinha does research on the social behavior of bees at the molecular level at the U of I's Institute for Genomic Biology.

Chemistry professor Jonathan Sweedler is studying bee brain neuropeptides to better understand how the human brain works.

The theme here, like stem cells, is that we at the U of I can throw a lot of brainpower from a lot of different disciplinary places at problems.

That, of course, is the big idea behind One Medicine.

To conclude: I applaud your good work here on One Medicine. It’s promising. It’s exciting. Remember, Daniel Burnham style, to make no little plans. And good luck going forward

Thank you.