Nathan Wolfe Quotes

#1. Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter, in whatever field you choose to explore.

Nathan Wolfe

#2. I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us.

Nathan Wolfe

#3. If you find diseases before they've really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.

Nathan Wolfe

#4. We may have charted all the continents on the planet, and we may have discovered all the mammals, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth.

Nathan Wolfe

#5. As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.

Nathan Wolfe

#6. Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia.

Nathan Wolfe

#7. The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely ... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.

Nathan Wolfe

#8. If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.

Nathan Wolfe

#9. We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.

Nathan Wolfe

#10. When there is an influenza threat, drop everything and focus on risks from influenza pandemics. When SARS spreads, focus on unknown respiratory diseases. This approach helps to quell public concern, but it's a hugely inefficient way to deal with future risks.

Nathan Wolfe

#11. The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

Nathan Wolfe

#12. Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

Nathan Wolfe

#13. The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.

Nathan Wolfe

#14. Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we've reached a point where we've discovered most of the things. I'm going tell you right now: Please don't despair.

Nathan Wolfe

#15. There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.

Nathan Wolfe

#16. With epidemics, people have been standing on the shore, waiting for the gusher to hit the ocean. But to prevent epidemics, you have to look at the various little sources that feed into the river.

Nathan Wolfe

#17. About 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before.

Nathan Wolfe

#18. If we can provide even a few months of early warning for just one pandemic, the benefits will outweigh all the time and energy we're devoting. Imagine preventing health crises, not just responding to them.

Nathan Wolfe

#19. If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

Nathan Wolfe

#20. We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there - which is the category that HIV falls into - and we're very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans.

Nathan Wolfe