March 5, 2009 Issue
Do Germs—Not Genes—Cause Diseases?
ASU’s Darwin Series Presents Paul Ewald March 17
Biologist Paul Ewald will discuss the evolution of disease organisms in a free public lecture on Tuesday, March 17, at the Broyhill Inn.
The next speaker in the Darwin Bicentennial Series at Appalachian State University is Paul Ewald, a biologist from the University of Louisville known for his theories about the co-evolution of humans and disease organisms. Ewald will present a lecture titled “Darwinian Insights into the Causes and Prevention of Cancer” on Tuesday, March 17, at 8:00 p.m. in the Broyhill Inn’s Powers Grand Hall.
The Darwin Bicentennial Series at ASU is a yearlong celebration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species, with lectures, films and arts events focusing on Darwin’s ideas and their impact on society, as well as his theory of evolution.
Ewald is an evolutionary biologist specializing in the evolution of infectious disease. He received his doctorate from the University of Washington in zoology, with specialization in ecology and evolution.
He was the first recipient of the George R. Burch Fellowship in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences, and his publication of Evolution of Infectious Disease is widely acknowledged by doctors and scientists as a watershed in the emergence of the new discipline of evolutionary medicine. He has been featured in The Atlantic, Newsweek, Discover and Forbes.
In his book Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease and other Deadly Ailments, Ewald argues that many diseases attributed to environmental stresses may actually be caused by bacteria or viruses instead.
“For most of the last two centuries, people have been using interventions to knock down infectious diseases as much as possible. The idea is that we’re going to use weapons like vaccines and antibiotics or hygienic interventions to reduce the frequency of infection as much as possible,” Ewald said in an interview with PBS.
“My point is that there’s another way of controlling these disease organisms,” he continued. “Instead of using these weapons--antibiotics and vaccines and hygiene improvements--as a way of knocking down the organism, we can use those interventions to control the evolution of the organisms instead of getting the organisms evolving around our interventions. We can get the organisms to evolve to be less harmful than they have been in the past. Essentially, what I’m saying is we can use interventions like vaccines or like hygienic improvements to domesticate these organisms.”
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call 828-262-7660 or click to www.universityforum.appstate.edu.
Want To Go?
Date: Tuesday, March 17
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Broyhill Inn Powers Grand Hall, Boone
Cost: Free
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