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Norma Allewell: Tanya, thank you very much for that generous introduction. It's very
heartwarming to see so many friends and colleagues here, including faculty from the University
of Maryland, some of whom I haven't seen in almost a year, and what I want to do today
is take you on what has been a very challenging, exciting and rewarding journey for me. About
eighteen months ago, when I decided to apply for a Jefferson Science Fellowship, I embarked
upon a journey from the fascinating, challenging, and beautiful world of proteins, most of you
probably don't think of proteins as being beautiful, probably don't know what they look
like, but I think I'll be able to persuade you that they are indeed very beautiful. To
the equally fascinating and challenging and dynamic East Asia and Pacific region, as well
as the world of science diplomacy, and what I want to do today is to share some of the
experiences that I've had along the way, and some of the things that I've learned.
So let's begin with proteins, first of all, what to proteins do? Proteins are exquisite
macromolecular machines that perform all of the tasks in the cell that is necessary to
keep the cells alive, and therefore to keep the organism alive. Enzymes catalyze chemical
reaction, membrane transport proteins move molecules and ions through membranes. Motor
proteins drive muscle contraction, cell movement and transport of materials within cells, signaling
proteins transmit signals within and between cells, and the immune system proteins recognize
and disable foreign molecules and microorganisms.
So as you are sitting there, quietly listening to this lecture, all of these processes are
going on in your body at a very rapid rate. Just think of those particles popping around
in your cells. It's enough to make anyone nervous. So then, what are proteins made of
and how are they made. So proteins are polymers made up of small molecules called amino acids
that are hooked together by macromolecular machines called ribosomes, which translate
the genetic information in a molecule called messenger RNA, which is of course derived
from DNA into the sequence of amino acids in the protein. There are 23 different kinds
of amino acids in the protein, and I've tried to indicate with these arrows that they all
have something in common. They have functional groups that either end that are able connect
to the next amino acid in the chain, but they also have a distinct chemical group, which
confers unique chemical properties on that particular amino acid. Now, although proteins
are linear polymers, they don't exist in this shape within the cell, instead they fold up
into compact structures and this folding process is driven by weak interactions between the
different functional groups of the different amino acids, plus some of the groups located
right on the backbone. Despite their very diverse functions, all proteins have some
fundamental physical properties in common, which enable them to perform all of the functions
that they are capable of. So first of all, when the protein folds up creates a unique
surface on the protein which allows it to selectively and specifically interact with
the molecule that nature evolved the protein to interact with. So this is the surface of
a sub-unit of a protein called NAGS which you'll hearing about later. And you can probably
see that it has peaks and valleys, it's not a flat surface, but in addition it has positively
charged groups coded in blue, negatively charged groups coded in red and oily groups, surfaces,
coded in green. And so, when the protein meets up with its partner, as you would expect,
blue is coupled with red, red is coupled with blue, and the oily patches come together because
they don't like to be in contact with water. Proteins are also flexible, this folded shape
that they assume is not fixed, but undergoes changes depending upon environmental condition,
so here for example is the entire NAGS molecule, it's made up of six of these sub-units which
are coded in different colors.
This is the shape of the molecule, in the absence of one of the amino acids called arginine,
which not by accident is the amino acid that has the most nitrogens of any amino acid.
And when arginine binds, it causes the protein to flip its overall structure, just as, as
this is baseball season, when a ball hits a catcher's glove, the catcher's glove changes
shape. And then finally, these structures are dynamic, this structural change that I
have shown here, occurs fairly slow for molecule's time scale perhaps, tenths of seconds, but
the structures are also in constant dynamic motion, breathing, we call it. And what that
does it to allow small molecules to enter the protein and then to get out again. What
I'm going to illustrate that with in just a minute or so is -- in fact less than a minute
-- is a very short video of this particular protein: the potassium channel. And the structure
of two of its subunits is shown here. Each sub-unit has two long helices, this is one
of the structures that the proteins tends to form when it folds. One short helix up
here, and the helices are connected by loops, so here we have one sub unit, here we have
a second sub unit, and the potassium ion is able to make its way through this channel
between the two sub units, and what controls the entry of the potassium ion to the channel
is the movement of theses loops.
Other ions, so potassium is a positively charged ion, other positively charged ions are not
able to enter because they don't fit the dimensions of the channel. I think I've told you everything
that is on these three. So the potassium channel is located in the cell membrane of the cell.
The cell membrane is largely made up of lipid biolayer which binds other charged pieces
cannot get through, but putting the channel in the lipid membrane allows potassium to
enter the cell, and potassium is required for many cellular functions. And I've already
said that the flexible loops regulate that. Okay, so here we have the lipid bilayer of
the cell membrane, so this would be the outside of the cell, this would be the inside of the
cell, these are water molecules, and the bilayer is made of molecules that have long, floppy
oily tails and then positively and negatively charged groups on the surface, to enable the
cell to coexist comfortably in its aqueous environment. And this is the inside of the
cell, with basically a mirror image of the top half of this structure, with again, fatty
tails and charged ionic groups on the surface. Here are -- the green balls are two potassium
ions which would eventually make their way though -- you will see a lot of motion of
these fairly fluid fatty side chains here, you will see occasionally the helices flex,
and you'll see a little bouncing around within the channel, the two potassium ions and water
molecules bounce like tennis balls.
Okay, so having talked about proteins in general I'd like to talk a little bit, a very little
bit, about how a few proteins are involved in disease. This is actually one of the most
important and exciting areas of protein science, so this is work that I've carried out over
a period of close to 20 years, it started in Minnesota with a colleague of mine Dr.
Mandel Tuchman, who is a pediatric geneticist, and as you can see an international team,
all of us migrated from Minnesota to this area independently, I came by one path, Mandel
came by another. He is at the Children's National Medical Center at Irving in Michigan, it's
an absolutely wonderful place if you ever have an opportunity, I encourage you to visit
it. And so what -- as I said, Mandel is a pediatric geneticist, and what he's been interested
in all of his life is diseases of a nitrogen metabolism. When we eat food, nitrogen is
released when the food is broken down in the form of ammonia, the active ingredient of
bleach, and some of it enters the bloodstream. You can imagine that if too much of it enters
the bloodstream that this would not be a good thing, and what it does most prominently is
to cause neurological symptoms which in severe cases will result in comas or even death.
To regulate the amount of ammonia in the blood, nature has evolved a biochemical pathway called
the Urea cycle, which takes ammonia in and converts it to -- ammonia is also positively
charged -- converts it to a neutral molecule containing two nitrogen atoms which is called
urea, which is excreted from the urine in the kidneys. The urea cycle is primarily located
in the liver.
Now believe it or not, Mendal and I have spent most of this time looking at two enzymes in
this pathway, the first is an enzyme called OTCase which helps to drive the pathway converting
ammonia to urea. The second enzyme, NAGS has a different role, you'll notice that it's
right up here at the beginning of the transition from ammonia to the intermediates of the urea
cycle. This is an example of a feedback system, which is enormously important in biological
and biochemical functioning, and so as the arrows indicate, when nitrogen is plentiful
a certain amount of that nitrogen will be incorporated into this amino acid arginine
which I showed you previously. And so arginine is a measure of how much nitrogen is in the
system at any given time. NAGS controls the input of ammonia into the urea cycle and so
if you follow these rows around, the nitrogen released from food, turns into arginine, which
binds to NAGS through a selective and specific interaction, increasing its activity, and
then NAGS produces another small molecule which increases the rate at which ammonia
enters the urea cycle, so this siphons off ammonia so that it's level in the bloodstream
doesn't get above the normal limit in normal patients.
If there are mutations in any of the proteins involved in this process, of course it will
slow down, and that will cause this hyper ammonemia, the raising of levels of ammonia
in the bloodstream, and as I say, very severe consequences for a patient. So, we begin by
studying the mutations in OTCase's. It turns out that more mutations have been identified
in OTCase's than in any other enzyme of the urea cycle, so it's the most common cause
of hyper ammonemia. And we really took it from a disease, finding the gene, cloning
it, producing the protein in bacteria, understanding the protein, crystallizing it and determining
its three dimensional structure and mapping all of those mutations on the protein. We
then moved on to NAGS which has proven to be much more challenging, it's probably associated
with the membrane, it's kind of floppy, it's probably stabilized by other proteins. We've
now cracked it. We now have taken five NAGS proteins from different species through that
whole process and we're hoping that we will get the human enzyme to the same point within
the next year or so. So, this last little addendum just makes the point that when a
NAGS is mutated it will interfere with this feedback loop, ammonia will not be able to
enter the urea cycle efficiently, and will instead end up in the bloodstream.
So this is just a pretty picture of most of the structure of OTCase's with all of the
mutations Mendel and colleagues identified. The reason there are red and blue balls, is
that depending on the severity of the effect of the mutation on nitrogen metabolism, the
consequences of a mutation may show up in severe cases right: when a baby is born, because
it can no longer use it's mother's systems to clear ammonia from the blood, or so those
are shown in red of course, whereas mutations that don't have such deleterious effects may
not show up until adulthood, the patient may be walking around having no idea that they
have this particular mutation, and then it often manifests itself under stress, odd kinds
of stress, childbirth is one, accidents, like car accidents is another, and eating 24 eggs
at a fraternity initiation probably also would not be a good thing to do.
NAG deficiency and OTC deficiency are examples of orphan diseases, they affect only small
populations which often live in isolated circumstances, the Faroe Islands, for example has a large
distribution of one of these diseases, and there are of course many other proteins that
have major global consequences, so I just thought I would show you the three proteins
involved in three of the major health issues of our time, obesity, hopefully not yet influenza,
and senility. So on the left is the insulin receptor. Insulin is a protein hormone that
signals cells in the liver to absorb glucose and store it in a polymer called glycogen.
And the way this works is that that the insulin receptor, you can probably recognize as another
membrane protein embedded in the cell membrane of liver cells with large external globular
domain, a trans membrane region, and then an internal sub unit. Insulin binds to this
globular sub unit on the surface, which transmits a signal through the cell membrane to the
beta subunit, which in turn alters its interactions with cell signaling proteins within the cell
that says: absorb glucose and turn it into glycogen.
On the right are two proteins that are involved in neurodegenerative diseases that cause senility
and perhaps other diseases. So, this is the amyloid pre -- this orange structure is the
amyloid precursor protein -- which is found in the plaques of Alzheimer's disease, more
conspicuous in a way. Purple protein is called presenilin, it has eight helices which allow
it to loop back and forth through the membrane. Now as long the precursor protein stays safely
in the membrane, we will not come down with neurodegenerative diseases. However, when
protein's enzymes that are able to clip pieces of protein away, nibble away at both ends
of the amyloid precursor protein, it's released from the membrane and seeks out other amyloid
proteins to form the amyloid plaques which we hear so much about. It appears that the
senilin's role in this is that this particular loop is required in some way for the functioning
of this particular enzyme at the intracellular surface of the lipid membrane.
Okay, well, moving on from proteins, let's embark to East Asia and the Pacific and science
diplomacy. Now it will probably come as surprise to some of the Foreign Service Officers in
the room to know that some parts of this map were almost as unfamiliar to me when I began
working in EAP this fall, as the protein structures that I've been showing are to you. So, for
those of you who also may be geographically challenged I'm just going to walk through
this map. Actually, at the time that I interviewed, I recall asking Tanya Anderson and Melissa
Sweeney how they managed to simultaneously think about 23 different countries that are
so diverse, and one of the things that I've learned is that it's very helpful to think
of sub regions, so probably obvious to you, wasn't so obvious to me eight months ago.
So up here, of course, we have North Asia, with three economic giants, China, South Korea
and Japan as well as Mongolia, which is proving to have very large mining resources, below
North Asia we have the Mekong peninsula, with Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Here we have the maritime states, beginning with Malaysia, and Singapore, moving on to
Indonesia, the country with the third largest population in the world and the leading Muslim
majority country. Timor-Leste, which has only been in existence for ten years, just had
a democratically run election. Then we move on to -- I didn't mention Taiwan actually
here, off China -- or Hong Kong as a matter of fact. But then we move on to the Pacific
Islands, beginning with the Philippines, Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon
Islands, Samoa and Fiji. And then of course down here in the south we have Australia and
New Zealand. One of the things that's very obvious on this map is the amount of water
bed is present, this water has a profound effect on many of the geopolitical issues
that the bureau deals with. It's not only the ocean, the Pacific Ocean but also the
major rivers. For example, the Mekong river in the Mekong Peninsula, the Yangtze River
over in China, and to the east, not part of our bureau, but not too far away the Indus
river in India.
Well this has been a truly wonderful year to be in East Asia and Pacific. I think all
of us who came in felt that we had really hit the jackpot when we learned that the United
States Government had decided to emphasize building its relationships in Asia. As Hilary
Clinton said in a very influential article in Foreign Affairs back in November 2011,
"We are proud of our European partnerships and all that they deliver, our challenge now
is to build a web of partnerships and institutions across the Pacific that is as durable and
as consistent with American interests and values as the web we have built across the
Atlantic." And so here is Secretary Clinton meeting the director of the Foreign Ministry
of Indonesia, just before meetings of ASEAN and EAS and then at the APEC meeting where
President Obama rolled out a Trans-Pacific Partnership among other things. This has also
been the year that the winds of political change blew through Burma. It's been very
very exciting to follow that and the admission of Aung San Suu Kyi to the lower House of
the Burma Parliament together with 43 of her colleagues in the New Democratic Party. This
is a hugely challenged region, first there is its physical scale, 24 million square kilometer,
its huge and rapidly growing population, 2 billion now, predicted to go to 2 and a half
billion by 2020. Enormous geographic, economical, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity,
centuries of wars and conflicts, three major international wars within the 20th century,
important and severe trans-boundary conflicts, and then internal conflicts within various
countries, often large scale and with very tragic consequences.
Human rights are also somewhat of an issue, of course fundamental human rights are freedom
of expression, association and religion. One of the things I didn't know when I came to
the State Department is how actively the State Department is involved in informing Congress,
which of course makes funding decisions about the status of human rights within the region.
And three of the areas that I believe we have to produce reports on are first trafficking
in persons, secondly child labor, and third violence against children and women. I don't
really need to talk about the expansive and explosive development that's going on, economic
development that's going on in much of the region, which creates great opportunities
but also great challenges. And finally the subsuming challenge, global climate change,
which of course is affecting every part of the world, but is a particular threat to east
Asia and the Pacific for several reasons, which I'll talk about a little later. This
will just give you an example of the diversity. This happens to focus on health and economic
issues. I decided to include a Western style democracy, very well developed, Australia,
China, which is of course unique, Indonesia I've mentioned is a huge population and majority
Muslim. And then, one of the countries of the Mekong peninsula. Off to the right are
Timor-Leste and also the Pacific islands, even more challenged than the Mekong Peninsula
countries.
However, challenges also present opportunities, as is often said, and these are I think, the
major challenges in science diplomacy in this region, again they are unique to this region,
but I'm using this as an introduction to telling you about some of the efforts in science and
diplomacy which are taking placed around these topics. So the grand challenge is clearly
climate adaptation, which of course has a ripple effect on the environment, especially
water issues and biodiversity, energy needs, which in turn propagates to nuclear security,
environmental changes affect food security, and of course all of these have an impact
on health. Underpinning all of this is the importance of STEM education and innovation
and we have very robust programs supporting efforts in those areas in this region.
So, how do we deal with these very large challenges, well the answer is here, we work through partnerships.
So this slide will show you the national and international partnerships that the State
Department is involved in, again I didn't understand that all of these partnerships
existed, when I came here, but most of these and their acronyms have become pretty familiar.
So we worked, first of all, very extensively with the other federal agencies. Interagency
working groups they are called, or IPC's at a higher level. And the principal Federal
agencies that we work with in terms of health issues are of course the Center for Disease
Control, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, again something that
I was not entirely aware of, National Science Foundation and USAID, and we have several
people from USAID here today. In terms of the environment of course, USAID and NSF are
also involved, but in addition we have the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior,
the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and NOA.
Public private partnerships are becoming a very big deal, as there's concern about the
future of the budget, and as corporations become more interested in the opportunities
in East Asia and the Pacific, there are many opportunities. We also work with Civil Societies,
numerous NGO's, the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy for example, also the Asia
Foundation which receives Congressional funding and is an important player. We've had of course
bilateral interactions with the countries in the region for many many years, in fact
at one time that was the most prominent form of diplomacy. It's become apparent as I'll
say more about later, that in fact bi-lateral partnerships have many advantages. In terms
of science, one of the ways in which goals are established is through joint commission
meetings of the leaders of the various technical agencies in both the United States and also
the partner country, so called JCM's. We've just had JCM's with both China on the margins
of the SNED meeting and also with Indonesia, and there are more coming up. The goal is
to do these on a two year cycle.
Here are some of the organizations within the region that we work with multilaterally.
I'll be showing you a diagram of this in just a minute, but since not all of these are shown
here, I'll just step through it. ASEAN is the oldest and has the most comprehensive
agenda of any of these bilateral or multilateral organizations, the association for South East
Asia Nations, APEC: the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation organization, East Asian Summit,
the Asia Regional Forum, the Lower Mekong Initiative, the Pacific Island Forum, and
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which I mentioned earlier. And then in terms of international
organizations of course we worked closely with several of the UN bodies, the UN Food
and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, International Atomic Energy
Agency, UNESCO, Education Science and Culture, the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank
which is a big player in terms of funding.
So this is a diagram of the relationship between the countries in the region, broadly defined,
and each of the organizations that I just listed, and it'll be helpful to think of this
as superimposed upon a map, and so the circles and ellipses that are over here include many
countries in eastern Asia, of course closer to the United States, and similarly of course,
this particular organization, which I don't hear much about, involves South and Northern Asia. And then, so as you
move out in these concentric circles, here we have the members of ASEAN, five maritime
states and five mainland states. ASEAN +3 includes the economic powerhouses South Korea,
Japan and China. The East Asia Summit brings in New Zealand Australia. And APEC brings
in Hong Kong, China, Chinese Taipei or Taiwan, Mexico, Peru and Chile. Not shown here is
the Trans-Pacific Partnership which will link more North, South and Central American countries
with East Asia and the Pacific. You can probably read this, it's a little hard to do on an
eight by eleven sheet of paper, but this diagram also includes the FOSI of the various multilateral
organizations, so as I said, ASEAN has a very broad mission that includes all of the top
seven, whereas the Asia Regional Forum is focused almost exclusively on security with
of course a big political dimension.
So now moving on to science and technology activities in the region, I've said before
that this is a very vulnerable regions, in terms of climate adaptation for at least three
regions, as illustrated by this aerial view of the Mekong Peninsula, there are many islands,
there are very long coastlines, there are major rivers, as is the case everywhere there
are very high population densities, and many coastal regions. The East Asian Pacific region
includes five of the world's largest megalopolis, and they are all located right on the coastline.
There are other, of course, cities located on the major rivers, and these will also be
challenged by flooding. And then third the region has very meager economic, institutional
and technical resources in many areas, and so this makes it difficult to cope with the
upcoming challenges which include disappearing landmass. The Pacific Islanders are just distraught
about this, but of course much larger regions along the coast is also likely to disappear.
Catastrophic flooding, both from extreme weather and also from too much water running down
the rivers. Increased disease susceptibility, because the uncontrolled spread of water will
create both sanitation issues and also fantastic breeding grounds for insect vectors for insect-borne
diseases. Increased energy needs, primarily because of the breathtaking development that's
occurring but also as the temperature rises of course there will be more need for cooling,
and then finally major threats to biodiversity that I'll be saying more about in just a minute.
So the next few slides will just describe very briefly what for me have been the highlights
in climate energy and biodiversity within the last year. First of all I was just so
interested in learning about the Durban Agreement which took place in the fall, which fundamentally
begins to plan, it is an agreement to begin to plan how to reduce the disparity between
developed and developing countries in terms of carbon emissions and the release of gases
that produce global warming. This is a wonderful program which one Jefferson Fellow and one
Triple E Fellow, in the office in which I worked, were involved in its early years.
As you probably know, the use of traditional cook stoves releases massive amounts of carbon
particles and also gases that warm the climate. And they are used by 3 billion people, bureaucracy
and they cause 2 billion deaths a year. A group of very talented people got behind trying
to --and visionary people -- got behind trying to replace the traditional cook stoves around
the world with modern cook stoves which have much reduced emissions. This will have the
effect of both mitigating climate change and also saving lives and empowering women. This
figure is of cook stoves I believe in Mongolia, you can see that these are two dollars apiece,
and can replace the noxious ones that have been in use previously.
Third, I was very interested to learn about the tension between the use of hydroelectric
power as a source of clean energy, and the effect of the dams that are required to produce
it. The dams have, of course, very deleterious effects on water flow and therefore the environment
downstream. My first inkling that things were about to change in Burma was when I read that
in fact, Thein Sein had decided to stop the construction of a dam funded by China along
the Irrawaddy River, in part because of protests from the people of Burma. This figure of course
shows a bridge over the Irrawaddy River right in Rangoon. And then finally, energy and nuclear
security has been the focus of a lot of attention, partly because of Fukishima, but also because
increasing energy needs have created concerns in both Korea and Taiwan specifically, as
to the extent to which they should use nuclear energy to meet their growing energy needs.
There are many programs working to conserve the environment and protect biodiversity in
the East Asia and Pacific Region, many of them funded primarily by USAID. These programs,
the Asia region and endangered species trafficking, is funded by USAID to the tune of over in
the last decade tens of millions of dollars. And the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network
is a sort of a homegrown program, both with the same goals, of combating illegal wildlife
trafficking by reducing consumer demand and strengthening law enforcement, regional cooperation
and then an anti-trafficking network. Many of the iconic species as you know have only
a few thousand members still in the wild: the pandas, the rhinos and the tigers, but
there are many other species that are also threatened. For example a reptile called pangolin,
which is a major source of meat, other reptiles are also used in the same way. Birds, flowers,
plants and so on and so forth. So this program is multifaceted, it does a lot of training
of both law officers and people who work directly on protection of both wildlife and forests,
developing a legal structure and then also developing ways of -- using the Internet actually
is quite a big tool -- and other strategies to slow down the destruction. This picture
of course is a rhino who has had his horn removed and is clearly pretty badly infected.
Both tiger bones and rhino horns are very important in traditional medicine, they are
believed to have magical powers. So this is a mainland program, there is also the Coral
Triangle Initiative, which is working to protect coral reefs, fisheries and food security in
six regions that form a triangle. One of the strategies is to plant mangroves along the
coast to prevent flooding and the figure at the bottom just shows a relatively mature
mangrove growth.
Moving on to health, there are three major challenges. First of all in infectious disease,
the big three: tuberculosis, malaria and ***. Tuberculosis and *** used to kill a few million
people every year, those numbers are declining fortunately. Malaria has declined even more
sharply, in part as a result of the efforts of USAID. Neglected tropical diseases, these
are diseases that affect millions - billions of people in the underdeveloped regions around
the world. Many of them are parasitic worms, leprosy is one for example, [unintelligible]
is another. Emerging disesases, there's a constant concern about new diseases that we
have no idea how to deal with emerging from this region. For a few reasons, one actually
is that it's warmer and therefore genes mutate more rapidly so there's more opportunity for
new organisms to arise. The avian flu has been in the headlines all year long because
of the experiments that produced an airborne flu that infects ferrets. There are many others
to be concerned about. Pandemics that spread around the world, perhaps as a result of emerging
diseases. And finally, bioterrorism, which fortunately so far we've done pretty well
with. The three major health challenges, from environmental factors are: air quality, which
is a major concern in the very large cities of the region, food and water security and
nuclear security, I've talked about those before, and then non-communicable diseases:
diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease and so on and so forth.
Highlights in health for me were first the development of a very large consortium called
Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases, I don't see how you turn that into an acronym,
but maybe there's a way, with governmental partners, both United States, Europe and Saudi
Arabia, corporate partnerships, many of the big international corporations, and then foundations,
particularly the Gates foundation. And the goal is to eliminate five NTD's by 2020 and
to control five others. This would improve the lives of 1.4 billion people. Non-communicable
diseases got a lot of headlines right at the beginning of this year, as a result of discussions
that took place around the United Nations General Assembly, and a resolution was passed
to set the stage for doing more to reduce the spread of non-communicable diseases around
the world.
Biological threat reduction is a huge activity, and I was actually very comforted to hear
that it is such a vigorous effort of the United States government. One component of this is
the World Health Organization International Health Regulations which I think were put
in place maybe around 2005. And the goal is to have all countries conform to these health
regulations by this June as a matter of fact. The goal is to make sure that the infrastructure
is in place to diagnose, to prevent when possible, to treat, and importantly to communicate about
diseases in every country in the world. Biological threat reduction got a lot of help this year
when Congress authorized the Cooperative Threat Reduction Dollars, which had previously been
used to deal with nuclear and infectious disease issues in the former Soviet Union for biological
threat reduction around the world. And I'll show you a slide that expands on that in just
a minute. This picture is of the USS Mercy which is an example of many vehicles and many
activities that are involved in East Asia and the Pacific in working to promote health
and to help countries deal with the issues that they face.
So, just to give you an idea of sort of the magnitude of the bio engagement efforts this
is a list of partners that are involved in this. So there are a bunch of countries, a
bunch of organization in the East Asia and the Pacific that focus on implementing the
IHR regulations. There's an initiative in the Lower Mekong Delta, funded by USAID, the
Asian Development Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. PACOM is a major player, the Pacific
Fleet with AFRIMS and NAMRU-2 is an example of military to military collaboration to develop
bio-surveillance capacity. There are other NAMRU's in other parts of the world. Finally,
just a couple of examples of our efforts to promote STEM and innovation activities. GIST
is a very successful program that comes out of NIT that works to promote innovation around
the world but has a couple of countries in the East Asia and Pacific, Malaysia and Indonesia
as a special focus right now, and so it does all of the things that people who want or
organizations that want to promote innovation do. We have three finalists from this region,
out of the ten competing for an award from GIST, and we're hopeful that all three will
win.
NeXXt is an exciting program developed by Sandra Laney who is in the Bureau of Oceans,
Environment and Science, to develop partner programs between US women's colleges and other
countries. And part of the motivation for developing this program was to, because it
is thought and it is proving to be the case, a way to overcome the concerns that Muslim
parents might have about sending their girls to co-educational schools, and the likelihood
that parents will believe that women's colleges will provide a more protected environment.
Finally, just a couple of slides about science diplomacy in general. I liked the suggestion
of Vaughan Turekian and Norman Ryder from the AAAS Science and Diplomacy Center that
science diplomacy -- there are basically three kinds of science diplomacy. On the one hand,
there's science for diplomacy, using science as a way to establish a dialogue with countries
that may not be aligned with us on some other issues, but are comfortable engaging in scientific
discussions and activities because science is relatively value neutral, and also the
countries of the Pacific are very firm believers that science and technology is going to be
a big part of their future. Diplomacy for science is the flipside, this is when the
State Department is needed to help launch large international ventures, so an example
of both the Coral Triangle Initiative and the USAID ARREST program are examples of this.
And finally in an ideal world, at least from my point of view, science is an integral part
of diplomacy. You don't do science and separately do diplomacy. In every conversation, science
and diplomacy are interwoven, and that's the kind of relationship that we have with most
of the developed countries. So, for example, the Australian radar telescopes are an example
of that sort of thing. When the leaders of Korea, China, and I'm sorry, Korea, Japan
and Australia come to the United States or vice versa, the conversations weave back and
forth between science and diplomacy.
Finally, the last slide are some of the thoughts I've had about the challenges of science diplomacy.
First it requires a deep knowledge of both science and diplomacy. Few of us have both,
and so it usually requires partnerships between scientists and diplomats. In every situation,
there will be a right balance between science development and diplomacy, which are three
very different approaches, and with people representing all of those points of view in
one room together, it's important and necessary to reconcile the three agendas. As we move
forward with science diplomacy efforts, there are almost always international diplomatic
challenges, countries that are maybe a little nervous about us getting too involved in their
business and access issues. And to sustain the programs a lot of work needs to go into
building partnerships and institutional supports of the types that I described and then working
to sustain the resources the infrastructure and the funding that is needed to keep them
going. So it's a big challenge, but it's also very rewarding, and I think very important
in the toolkit of American diplomacy.
And so I'll stop now, thanks to everyone not only the people who are here today, but also
the wonderful leaders that I've worked for this year, starting with Hilary Clinton and
her fantastic vision, and Kurt Campbell the Assistant Secretary for the bureau, and Tanya,
who has been a great pleasure to work with. So I'll stop now and take questions.
Sharon Hrynkow:
Well I'd like to ask the first question, Norma, I'm Sharon Hrynkow, and thank you very very
much for a wonderful presentation and also thank you for diving in on so many S&T issues
in the region. It really was a wonderful presentation.
Norma Allewell:
Thank you.
Sharon Hrynkow:
My question is about protein science, and I'd like to know where you see protein science
going. But also if we could tie that back to EAP region, where are the opportunities
for partnerships within EAP for US scientists like yourself? You have been working in this
arena for so long. Thank you.
Norma Allewell:
So the trajectory of protein science, going back to about the beginning of the 20th century,
was moving from very basic studies that needed to be done just to understand what proteins
were, at one time it was thought that they weren't well defined protein entities. And
then moving through the kind of physical and mechanistic work that I've described, getting
a better understanding of how they do what they do. Then the Recombinant DNA Revolution
of course gave us a much bigger toolkit, and we now have a pretty broad and deep understanding
of how proteins work.
As a result, there are two frontiers that are particularly exciting right now. The first
is translational medicine, where instead of focusing primarily on studying proteins in
labs, it's very tightly coupled to clinical needs, you'll be very familiar with this from
your work at NIH. This has arisen in part because the funders gradually caught on to
the fact that putting a lot of money into basic science as wonderful as it is, didn't
necessarily produce the kind of clinical results that we had promised. So there are great efforts,
motivated now by dollars, to ensure that basic scientists work with clinicians in order to
take the discoveries of the lab to the bed, some people say to the bedside, some people
say to the trench, all the way through the life cycle. This work that I described with
Mendel was actually a pretty early example of this, but the work that I've described
is actually commonplace now in many many labs, and moving on to much broader questions. Secondly,
synthetic biology offers tremendous opportunities, so as a result of our knowledge of not only
proteins but also the nucleic acids, I can't, but young people can construct little circuits
that can be put into cells and basically make cells do anything you want them to do. It's
very elegant and very exciting and clearly has great potential. It's also one of these
dual use situations, it can be used to do a lot of good. It can also be used to do great
harm. And so both the science funding agencies and the security agencies have a great interest
in synthetic biology.
Diana Rhymes [spelled phonetically]:
So I was going to say that, it occurs to me that-
Norma Allewell:
You are?
Diana Rhymes:
I'm Diana Rhymes, sorry.
Norma Allewell:
I did that not for my benefit, for the members of the-
Diana Rhymes:
I'm a Franklin Fellow in the EAPK at the Korea desk. I was going to say, it occurs to me
that a nice match between your interests, your scientific interests and the EAP region,
is as you were saying, there's going to be a lot of tropical diseases-
Norma Allewell:
Yes.
Diana Rhymes:
-as the climate changes.-
Norma Allewell:
Yes.
Diana Rhymes:
-More flooding and more water, there are going to be a lot of diseases coming up, and I'm
wondering if you were able to or if you foresee the United States developing partnerships
with the region in trying to combat, trying to predict and combat some of these diseases,
if you were able to make any partnerships of your own to continue to the future?
Norma Allewell:
That's above my pay grade at the present time, I certainly do work to support some of those
efforts, but I have not gone out on my own to the region to start one. I was pretty heavily
involved in things that are happening in Singapore, which is actually one of our very important
bases. So a couple of things happened this year. First of all there was a ready center,
the Emerging Disease Institute, in Singapore, which was funded during the Bush Administration,
which has now been absorbed into the National University of Singapore. This is actually
a terrific thing, because it gives it a permanent home and a place within the Singapore system.
So that will be very useful I think. Secondly, NAMRU-2 has been working throughout the year
on a very complex problem, how to move its command group out of Hawaii, where they have
been for a number of years, into the region so they can work more effectively. And that
has involved very complex diplomatic issues, requiring a close partnership between the
Department of Defense and the State Department, and I've participated in all of those discussions.
Many of the projects that I described deal with exactly what you're talking about, making
sure that the country is prepared for, as you say, the increase in infectious diseases,
which is very likely to occur, and in fact could potentially affect the rest of the world.
But these are very large-scale programs which require many individuals working as a team
rather than one individual going alone. Although of course there is always a leader. I hope
that's helpful.
William Colglazier:
Let's thank her for her lecture.
[applause]