The wrath of Hurricane Katrina wreaked billions of dollars in damage and claimed hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. For many researchers at universities affected by the storm, it also destroyed or menaced their lives’ work.
That work often involved animals that perished. At Tulane University, the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, and the University of Southern Mississippi, Katrina destroyed thousands of animals -- including fruit flies, mice, rabbits, dogs, and primates -- and materials ranging from tissue samples to cell lines to microorganisms like yeast and bacteria.
In some cases, the damage encompassed years, even decades of work. At Tulane, that included invaluable blood samples from the Bogalusa Heart Study, which has been tracing heart disease in thousands of people since 1972, according to Paul K. Whelton, senior vice president for health sciences.
“It’s really devastating,” says Dr. Whelton. “For people who have spent a lifetime building their research, to have important parts of it wiped out overnight is very difficult.”
Many of those scientists are now settled in temporary workplaces on other campuses, where they count their losses and plot new research -- or even new directions. Yet some scientists weathered the storm and its risky aftermath in place to protect their research and their animals, motivated by the knowledge that their losses might be irreplaceable.
Tyler J. Curiel, a professor of medicine at Tulane, recalls his assessment of the stakes for his cancer research: “It’s tens of millions of dollars of research. It’s over 20 years of work. And it’s all going to be gone.” He hunkered down in his lab until four days after Katrina had made landfall and later embarked on a difficult re-entry of the lab, even as New Orleans descended into chaos, to try to save his frozen samples.
In the Dark
Many researchers in New Orleans still do not know exactly how much they lost. Most of those at Tulane and at LSU’s Health Sciences Center have not been able to return to their labs to survey the damage or recover specimens. Administrators at both universities have been collecting lists of the most important research materials and working to ferry them out.
Arthur J. Lustig, a professor of biochemistry, hopes that Tulane staff members will retrieve his collection of genetically engineered yeast strains. “That was about 20 years of work,” he says.
For now, he is writing up some of his completed research on chromosome structure in borrowed space at Northwestern University. Once he gets the yeast strains, he will need to test them to see if they survived the power outage -- most were frozen at -112 degrees Fahrenheit. That testing, he says, will require several months of mundane work. Then he will have to decide in what direction to take his future research.
“There’s bound to be a lot of loss here,” he says, “but the question is how to try to carry on.” If his yeast strains did not survive, he says, “we have to be a little more original and shift gears.”
Other researchers have started to focus on rebuilding their research collections. Arthur L. Haas, who moved to New Orleans a year ago to become a professor and head of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Health Sciences Center, lost a large collection of proteins when they thawed. “We have 10 to 15 years of work in those,” he says. He intends to spend the next three months in a lab on another LSU campus, generating new proteins to replace some of his original collection. That way, when he gets back to his lab in New Orleans, he can begin doing experiments with them.
“The first week after it happens, it’s devastating. We went through all the classic stages of mourning,” he says. But now he is working with the university to get back on track. A team organized by the university has moved some frozen samples to safety from Mr. Haas’s lab in a flooded building. “Everything has run so smoothly in terms of the response of the school to this,” he says.
Katrina’s reach extended far inland as well, to the University of Southern Mississippi’s main campus, in Hattiesburg, some 75 miles from the coast. Though most of that campus’s buildings were unharmed, Robert C. Bateman Jr., a professor and head of the department of chemistry and biochemistry, had fruit-fly cells stored in freezers and refrigerators, and they thawed when the power went out. “We don’t know what we’ll be able to recover at this point,” he says. He estimates that he lost a year’s worth of work.
The destruction was more comprehensive on Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast campus. Most buildings suffered heavy damage, and some were destroyed. Cecil D. Burge, vice president for research and economic development, estimates that 25 faculty members lost specimens and collections, some worth millions of dollars. Most of the scientists who lost materials were at the university’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, in Ocean Springs, close to the beach.
One scientist, says William E. Hawkins, the laboratory’s executive director, lost all the fish from a project to restock striped bass. The program’s 35th anniversary would have been September 1. “It’s almost like the storm targeted him,” says Mr. Hawkins, “like it was time to end that project.” (The scientists hope the fish are now swimming free.)
Another researcher lost a collection of marine parasites gathered from all over the world. Specimens of many local shark species sat rotting in a freezer, which had no power for 10 days and had been inundated with salt water. “Anything that was on the ground floor is lost to us,” Mr. Hawkins says.
With the exception of the striped-bass project, however, none of the research programs will have to be halted altogether. Since the researchers study coastal sciences, many of them are eager to get into the field and look at the effects of the hurricane on the local environment, including its sharks and other wildlife.
Beyond Protocol
Like other Gulf Coast institutions, Southern Mississippi had an emergency protocol for storms. “The protocol worked,” says Mr. Hawkins. “I guess the storm just outmuscled us. ... You can’t move buildings to higher ground or keep out 24-foot wave surges.”
The hurricane’s intensity vanquished researchers in other tragic ways. Those who stayed at the Louisiana State University medical school during the storm and subsequent flood ultimately made the difficult decision to euthanize the surviving animals before evacuating. All of the Health Sciences Center’s 8,000 experimental animals died or were euthanized -- including the rhesus monkeys belonging to Joseph M. Moerschbaecher, vice chancellor for academic affairs, who was one of the last to evacuate the medical school. “There was nothing we could do” for the animals, he says. He estimates that 150 to 175 faculty members lost research materials.
Lisa R. Gerak, a research assistant professor in pharmacology, understands that LSU did its best for her animals. She evacuated to Mississippi before the storm, but her 50 rats were caged on the medical school’s first floor, which was flooded. She doesn’t know if the rats drowned, suffocated, or were euthanized. “I just know they aren’t there anymore,” she says.
She figures that once she buys new rats, she can train them in about four months, so that she can restart experiments in which she tests drugs that tamp down the nervous system. “I have to start over from scratch,” she says. She now works in lent space at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. She suspects many months will pass before she can return to New Orleans because the animal facilities at LSU need to be rebuilt.
“I’m sad for my rats,” she says. “It’s awful. And I’m sort of sad for me.”
Saving the Bush Babies
At Southern Mississippi, the animals that were threatened by the storm included a group of 26 bush babies, small primates with bushy tails and big eyes. Sheree L. Watson, a professor of psychology at the Hattiesburg campus, studies learning and social interactions among the animals. Her bush babies lived in a research facility that opened in June and lost power during the hurricane.
Ms. Watson weathered the storm in her home, in a suburb of Hattiesburg. She first checked on the bush babies on Tuesday morning, August 30, the day after the hurricane, using a chain saw to clear her driveway and some of the roads on the 10-mile trip. Without power, the ventilation system in the primate facility had turned off. The stench of ammonia from the animals’ urine was powerful.
To prevent the bush babies from suffocating, she made three or four trips daily to air out the facility. On the third day after the storm, she moved the animals into an outdoor, shaded aviary. But she did not know how long her supplies of food and water would last.
With incoming telephone service impossible, Ms. Watson managed to make a call to a colleague at the New Iberia Research Center, a primate research facility in Lafayette, La. Unfortunately, her colleague, M. Babette Fontenot, missed the call, and Ms. Watson had to leave a voice-mail message, asking Dr. Fontenot to arrange to evacuate the bush babies.
“I didn’t know if she got my message,” Ms. Watson recalls. But a few days later, Ms. Watson managed again to call Dr. Fontenot, who had contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On Labor Day, a week after the storm, Ms. Watson followed in her car as a van took the bush babies to safety at Mississippi State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, in Starkville, some 3½ hours away.
“It was just overwhelming the way everybody just rallied to our needs,” she says.
Power was restored to Hattiesburg in mid-September, and Ms. Watson’s animals are back home. “My situation had a happy ending,” she says. “But it’s been really difficult.”
Dancing in the Wreckage
At Tulane’s medical school, Tyler J. Curiel was also hoping for a happy ending.
His research samples -- genetically engineered cells, as well as tissue and blood samples taken from patients enrolled in clinical trials of experimental cancer treatments -- were stored in freezers kept at around -240 degrees Fahrenheit. They would die if allowed to warm to room temperature.
When electricity shut down hours before the hurricane struck, on Monday, August 29, the medical school’s emergency generators kicked in. Dr. Curiel says that he and Michael Brumlik, an instructor of medicine, started transferring samples from regular freezers and refrigerators to three liquid-nitrogen freezers, which were more likely to stay cold if the generators failed. They did the same with specimens in other researchers’ labs.
The ultracold freezers have electronic sensors that automatically add more liquid-nitrogen coolant when the levels get low. When the emergency generators stopped, on Tuesday, Dr. Curiel and Mr. Brumlik siphoned nitrogen from a storage tank and poured it into the freezers.
On Wednesday night, in preparation for Thursday’s evacuation, “we poured as much liquid nitrogen into as many freezers as we could find,” he says. “I was thinking it was an exercise in futility, that we’d never get back in time to salvage those things.”
Dr. Curiel then spent two days tending to patients in New Orleans’s beleaguered Charity Hospital before going to his in-laws’ home in Denver, where he stayed for a week and struggled to find a way to get back to his lab.
Finally, on September 10, two corporate-jet companies arranged for him and Mr. Brumlik to fly to New Orleans by private jet and to take a helicopter from the airport to Tulane. Accompanied by armed guards with M16 rifles, the two scientists brought 800 pounds of dry ice donated by other colleges to keep the samples cold -- that is, if they were still frozen -- while transporting them to safety at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
The labs in the medical school when they entered were hot and stuffy, stank of rotting garbage and overflowing toilets, and were pitch-dark because they were windowless. Preparing to open the first liquid-nitrogen freezer, Dr. Curiel recalls saying to Mr. Brumlik, “When I lift this lid up, we could find that all of our stuff has already melted. Are you prepared?” And Mr. Brumlik responded, “Yep, let’s just see.”
Dr. Curiel opened the freezer. “This big puff of cold liquid-nitrogen vapor came up. We knew our samples were still frozen solid,” he recalls. “We just went crazy. It was the same with all three [freezers]. We were high-fiving and dancing around.”
Having the samples means that Dr. Curiel can test whether an experimental cancer treatment has worked on patients’ own tissues. Among the samples were also cell types that were unique to his lab, including one line of cells that a Tulane medical student grew in the lab from a rare cancer he had contracted. Dr. Curiel plans to get started doing research again at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where his brother heads the Gene Therapy Center.
Dr. Curiel did lose some research materials, but, he says, “It’s things that can be replaced with time and effort and money.” Thanks to his own and others’ efforts, he can count himself as very lucky among the Gulf Coast researchers whose work was battered by Katrina.
Background articles from The Chronicle: