In 2006 Duke University Associate Professor Vance Fowler found the perfect animal model to investigate a question that had been bugging him ever since he started his residency at the university’s medical school in the mid-1990s: Why were some patients much better at fighting off bacterial infections than others?
Scanning research on more than 20 different inbred mouse strains, Fowler learned that they had a dramatic range of response to infection with the gram-positive bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. However, as a clinician with no lab of his own, however, Fowler relied on longtime collaborator and then head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), David Schwartz, for bench space and experimental guidance. Then, when Schwartz was asked to resign from NIEHS, Fowler’s research came to a screeching halt. As a result, Fowler was forced to cut off all communication with Schwartz and join a dozen or so other Duke researchers in an exodus from the institute. “We were kind of like the Israelites, wandering around out there in the desert for 40 years,” Fowler says. “We had no lab space, we had no mice,” Deshmukh adds. “We were basically on the street.”
Though he and his post-doc Hitesh Deshmukh ended up sharing half a bench and a hood in a Duke lab, they attained new grants, expanded their team to occupy the entire lab and are continuing to make strides in Staphylococcus aureus research.
Read more about Fowler’s team and research at The Scientist.