Getting their research funded is another potential problem. A search for the viral causes of common diseases does not fall neatly into established research categories. Fortunately, support from HHMI has allowed the work to go forward. “Every day I thank God that there’s an organization that’s willing to take those risks,” Ganem says.

Despite the difficulties, Ganem and DeRisi have high hopes for their joint project. According to DeRisi, “I don’t think either of us on our own would be able to accomplish this project individually, but together we make a really strong team.” Other researchers are equally enthusiastic. “There’s no question that this technology is going to produce critically important insights,” says Herbert W. “Skip” Virgin, who studies the effect of viruses on the immune system at Washington University in St. Louis. “And many more positive results will be forthcoming.”

In 1926, Paul de Kruif, a University of Michigan bacteriologist turned writer, published a best-selling book called The Microbe Hunters. In it, he told stories of “the bold and persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death”—from Anton van Leeuwenhoek to Louis Pasteur to Walter Reed—who discovered and tamed the microbial causes of disease. They “peeped into a fantastic sub-visible world of little things, creatures that had lived, had bred, had battled, had died, completely hidden from and unknown to all men from the beginning of time,” de Kruif wrote. “Beasts these were of a kind that ravaged and annihilated whole races of men ten million times larger than they were themselves.”

Ganem read Microbe Hunters while in eighth grade and was profoundly affected by it—an experience not uncommon among physician-scientists of his generation. “For me, it was like a police drama,” he says. “I loved the idea of trying to identify the infectious culprits of important diseases and then developing a courtroom strategy to prove their guilt.”

The work that Ganem and DeRisi have undertaken is squarely within the tradition documented by de Kruif. They are searching for the elusive microbes that continue to ravage human populations. The search is a difficult one, they acknowledge, because no one knows how many viruses infect humans and what effects those viruses may have. Geneticists have begun to inventory microbes in the environment—for example, J. Craig Venter, one of the people who spearheaded the sequencing of the human genome, reported several years ago on the many previously unknown DNA sequences of microbes he found in samples of water from the Sargasso Sea. But no one has tried to do the same for human beings.

DeRisi and Ganem believe that now is the perfect time to finish the job that past microbe hunters began. As soon as researchers inventory the full range of microbes that infect humans, technologies like DeRisi’s microarrays can link those microbes to specific diseases. “Forget the Sargasso Sea,” DeRisi says. “Do somebody’s nose.”

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