Kelly L. Warfield grew up in a suburb of Frederick, Maryland, not many miles from Fort Detrick, the US Army base devoted to medical research and biodefense within which sits USAMRIID. She was a local girl, bright and curious, whose mother owned a convenience store just outside the Fort Detrick gate. Helping her mom since she was a middle-schooler, Kelly first saw and spoke with scientists from the disease-research institute when they stopped into the store to buy Diet Coke, quarts of milk, Nicorette gum, Tylenol . . . whatever it is that top-level, Army-affiliated virologists buy. Unlike your average young convenience-store clerk, Kelly herself had a strong early aptitude for science. During high-school summers she worked in a government institute of standards and measures. After her freshman year of college and each summer until graduation, she served as a laboratory assistant at the National Cancer Institute, which had a branch on the grounds of Fort Detrick. She finished a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and considered her options for grad school. Around the same time she read The Hot Zone, which had recently been published.
“I’m a Hot Zone kid,” Warfield told me much later. She couldn’t vouch for the book’s scientific accuracy, she added, but its effect on her then was galvanic. She was inspired by one of the main characters, Nancy Jaax, an Army major and veterinary pathologist at USAMRIID, who had been part of the response team at the infected monkey house in Reston. Warfield herself hoped to return to Fort Detrick after graduate school and join USAMRIID as a scientist—if possible, to work on Ebola virus.
She looked for a doctoral program that would teach her virology and found a good one at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. An entire department at Baylor was devoted to viral research, with two dozen virologists, some of whom were quite eminent, though none dealt with such high-hazard pathogens as Ebola. Warfield found a place in the lab of a mentor there and began studying a group of gastrointestinal viruses, the rotaviruses, which cause diarrhea in humans. Her dissertation project looked at immune response against rotavirus infection in mice. That was intricate and significant work (rotaviruses kill a half million children around the world every year), though not especially dramatic. She got experience in using lab animals (especially mice) as models for human immune response to viral infections, and she learned a bit about making vaccines. In particular, she gained expertise in a line of vaccine development using viruslike particles (VLPs), rather than the more conventional approach, which uses live virus attenuated by laboratory-induced evolution. VLPs are essentially the outer shells of viruses, capable of inducing antibody production (immune readiness) but empty of functional innards, and therefore incapable of replicating or causing disease. VLPs seem to hold high promise for vaccines against viruses, such as Ebola, that might be too dangerous for live-virus vaccination.
It took some time for Kelly to achieve her dream, but not much, and she wasted none. With the doctorate finished, twenty-six-year-old Dr. Warfield began work at USAMRIID in June 2002, just days after her graduation in Houston. The Army’s institute had hired her, in part, for her VLP skills. Immediately she enrolled in the Special Immunizations Program, a punishing series of shots and more shots required before a new person can be cleared to enter the BSL-3 labs. (BSL-3 comprises the laboratory suites in which researchers generally work on dangerous but curable diseases, many caused by bacteria, such as anthrax and plague. BSL-4 is reserved for work on pathogens such as Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Machupo, and Hendra, for which there are neither vaccines nor treatments.) They vaccinated her against a whole list of unsavory things that she might or might not ever face in the lab—against Rift Valley fever, against Venezuelan equine encephalitis, against smallpox, and against anthrax—all within a year.
Some of these vaccines can make a person feel pretty sick. Anthrax, for Warfield, was a particular disfavorite. “Ooof, terrible!” she recalled, during our long conversation at her current home, in a new suburb outside of Frederick. “That’s a terrible vaccine.” After all these challenges to her immune system, and possibly as a result, she suffered an attack of rheumatoid arthritis, which runs in her family. Rheumatoid arthritis is an immune dysfunction, and the medicine used to control it can potentially suppress normal immune responses. “So I wasn’t allowed to get any vaccines anymore.” Nonetheless, she was cleared to enter