Quotes of the Day

In the dank spring of 2003, when Hong Kong was besieged by pestilence, it seemed unlikely that anyone of significance or global import could be based in the plagued city. Early in my research for a book about Hong Kong, China and the SARS outbreak, I met with Malik Peiris and Guan Yi, respectively professor and associate professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong. The two men were co-heads of Pandemic Preparedness in Asia, a group that monitors influenza around the region; both were friendly, concerned, uncynical and each, in his own way, devoted to Hong Kong in a manner that seemed quaintly anachronistic. Peiris was the more soft-spoken of the two, his Sri Lankan-by-way-of-Oxford accent so droningly dispatched that it occasionally caused me to lean in to hear him. Guan spoke faster, his choppy, Chinese-inflected English making him hard to understand. When I was struggling to comprehend some element of virology, they would draw me little diagrams to illustrate their point.

They were so patient with me that I initially came away with the wrong impression of them. It took a while to understand just how significant these men were, not locally but globally. I was in the habit of assuming that important research in science and medicine was done elsewhere, in the gold-standard laboratories of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta or the Pasteur Institute in Paris. But here? In Hong Kong? How could our dying city host groundbreaking research? And if Peiris and Guan were truly great, important men, why would they be so generous with their time?

I'm embarrassed to admit it now, but I traveled around the world, speaking with virologists, epidemiologists and public-health officials in Geneva, Rotterdam, New York, Atlanta and Beijing before I finally figured out that the true heroes in the fight against SARS were right in Hong Kong, where I lived and worked. Peiris and his team were the first to identify the agent that causes SARS. Guan, through his network of contacts in southern China, was the first to label the wild-animal markets of Guangzhou as a byway through which the virus came to infect humans. He had spent months in those markets himself, drawing blood and swabbing for feces in order to map out the early epidemiology of the virus. His research would compel Chinese authorities to shut down the markets, possibly a key step in preventing subsequent outbreaks.

It had taken mankind centuries to figure out how yellow fever was spread; in the 1980s we had progressed to the point that it had taken only two years to determine what caused AIDS. Peiris and Guan had done similar research, in the face of an onrushing epidemic — as their colleagues were literally lying stricken in neighboring hospital wards — in a matter of weeks. Both men would continue their heroic work as Hong Kong became the likely epicenter for another emerging disease: avian influenza. Guan and his team would sequence more than 250 strains of the bird-flu virus H5N1, providing the first accurate genetic roadmap of how it is mutating — and where it might strike next.

"There are only four questions you need to ask about a virus," Guan once told me. "What is it? What does it do? Where does it come from? And how do you kill it?" Malik Peiris, Guan Yi and their colleagues have made answering those questions their life. For that, we may owe them our lives.

• Karl Taro Greenfeld
• Their scientific research on deadly diseases makes all of us safer