Portland State Magazine Spring 2014

SPRING 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 21 students are examining nonprofit funding ideas, patenting and strategies for the best way to bring the idea to market. Another class taught by engineering professor Antonie Jetter, is also looking at the zombie viruses’ market potential, but from a little different angle. “My students are engineering graduates, and they’re strong in technology analysis,” she says. Her students are talking to potential end users of the technology, including clinicians who know how to store vaccines. They’re also looking at how the vaccine market is structured, and may point out business possibilities that Stedman and others hadn’t thought of. “It could inform Ken on what to do for his next round of experiments,” says Jetter. NOT ONLY could the discovery result in safe transit of more vaccines to the developing world, but it could also give clues to the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets, including Mars. NASA provided funding for Stedman’s research because of this extraterrestrial possibility. Water, and perhaps oceans, once coated the surface of Mars, according to data from several NASA missions. “Whether microbes were in the supposed Martian water is still up for debate,” states an article about Stedman’s research in the November 2013 issue of Astrobiology Magazine . If they were, then they might be fossilized on the Martian landscape. But Stedman says scientists don’t even know how to look for viruses in the geologic record of Earth, let alone Mars. “I’m convinced there are viruses in the rock record, but we don’t have the technology to detect them,” Stedman says in the article. “We really need to develop the technology here before we can even think about going to look there. We’re trying to do just that.” Here on Earth, it’s clear that once viruses are covered in silica, they are extremely resistant to drying out. They might also survive deep freezes and other harsh conditions. Stedman says that when viruses are encapsulated this way, they can be disbursed for many miles by geysers, fumaroles, or even volcanic explosions. Knowing that, is it possible that viruses could be transported by meteorite from one planet to another? As enticing as that idea is, Stedman doesn’t think so—although questions like that are always on the minds of people who study the stars. For now, his big goal is to be able to transport preserved vaccines to the developing world—by donkey if need be.  John Kirkland is a staff member in the PSU Office of University Communication. Professor Ken Stedman and student James Laidler discovered zombie viruses while taking samples from bubbling hot springs in the American West. Ken Stedman, biology faculty, experiments with viruses such as the T4 bacteriophage depicted in the illustration (copyright Russell Kightley). Coating the virus in a silicate shell keeps it in a state of suspended animation until it is revived with water, which dissolves the shell. He nicknamed the process “zombification.”