Author Interview: Dr Nicholas Bergman

How has our understanding of Bacillus anthracis and anthrax improved in recent years?

New technologies that have become available in the past decade have allowed for huge advances in how the B. anthracis genome is organized, how its genes are expressed and regulated, how B. anthracis interacts with the host during infection, and how different parts of the mammalian immune system work in fighting off B. anthracis during anthrax.

To what extent has recent anthrax research been driven by its potential threat as a weapon of terrorism?

Certainly there’s been a lot of additional interest because of the potential threat of B. anthracis being used as a weapon, but in the end I don’t think the research focus  differs from other bacterial pathogens—we’re looking at understanding the biology of the bacterium, understanding the host-pathogen interaction and at developing vaccines and therapeutics.

What historical role has research into b. anthracis played in our understanding of infectious diseases?  

This is captured in the book quite nicely. B. anthracis has been a model pathogen since the late 1800’s, when some of the founding fathers of microbiology like Koch and Pasteur used B. anthracis to demonstrate fundamental discoveries in bacterial pathogenesis.

Do you consider anthrax to pose more of a threat as a weapon of terrorism or as an agricultural disease?

I think we’ve all seen that it poses a real threat as a weapon of terrorism; as an agricultural disease it is and will probably continue to be a threat in developing nations, though in many countries including the US it’s pretty well-controlled by vaccination of livestock.

Why do you feel it is important to have a ‘state of the field’ assessment now?

Because there hasn’t been a comprehensive reference like this for a long time (2002), and the field has changed a lot in the past decade. 

What do you consider is the immediate future for anthrax research?

We’re already seeing budget cuts in anthrax research, though of course that’s reflective of the broad cuts that have occurred in the past couple years in nearly all areas of science.  It’s hard to predict where the field will go in the near future—there’s still a lot that’s not known about how B. anthracis interacts with the host during early and late anthrax, and big (and unforeseeable) discoveries there could really impact the directions that research takes. 

Unfortunately it seems that the more we study B. anthracis, the more questions we are confronted with.  I suppose that’s true of nearly all science, but I think a lot of people have been surprised by how complex this organism is turning out to be and how unique its interactions with the host really are.