Abstract
In this paper, it is argued that the fact that, so far, even the worst and most far-reaching epidemics—from the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and the Plague of Justinian in 541/542 AD to the Hong Kong Flu from 1968/69—always finally petered out can be explained using Manfred Eigen’s quasispecies concept: Indeed, as the infectious agents, while duplicating themselves in the infected organisms, mutate all the time, these infected organisms carry along quite a multitude of mutational variants or—in Manfred Eigen’s terms—a whole quasispecies of infectious agents implying that, within that quasispecies, those variants that differ from the wild type may actually serve as some kind of vaccination program when infecting some previously uninfected persons. In this context, some data regarding various recent epidemics will also be illustrated, using Daniel Huson’s SplitsTree software tool.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Baginsky mainly devoted himself to the treatment of children’s diseases. He was the director of the Kaiser und Kaiserin Friedrich Kinderkrankenhaus which he founded in 1890 in Berlin with the assistance of Rudolf Virchow (1821 to 1902, at his life time known as the Pope of Medicine and the Father of Modern Pathology because his work helped to discredit humorism, bringing more science to medicine, also the founder of social medicine and veterinary pathology). The Berlin Poliklinik für Kinderkrankheiten was also established through Baginsky’s efforts who also founded, in collaboration with his colleagues A. Monti and M. Herz from Stuttgart, the Archiv für Kinderheilkunde in 1880. His services were recognized by many governments, and he received many honors and awards. His numerous contributions to the science of medicine include treatises on school-hygiene and on children’s diseases.
Baginsky was also a member of the several associations and committees formed in Berlin for the purpose of checking antisemitism in Germany. He authored an essay entitled Die Hygienische Bedeutung der Mosaischen Gesetzgebung in which he comes forward as a stanch defender and enthusiastic admirer of the hygienic laws of Moses. He took active part in the social and religious life of the Jewish community in Berlin, and was one of the opponents of a movement to hold Sunday services—rather than Shabbat services—in the synagogues of that city.
Salk's sole focus had been to develop a safe and effective vaccine as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit: When asked who owned the patent to it, Salk said: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?. In 1960, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, today a world center for medical and scientific research.
A genetic mechanisms according to which deleterious mutations would accumulate in asexual populations in an irreversible manner which mechanisms has been proposed as one reason why sexual reproduction may have been favoured over asexual reproduction by the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller (1890–1967) who, after a turbulent career, was awarded the Nobel prize in 1946 “for the discovery that mutations can be induced by X-rays”)
Mark Kac (1914–1984) was born to a Polish–Jewish family; their town Kremenets changed hands from the Russian Empire to Poland when he was still a child. His main interest was probability theory. His famous question “Can one hear the shape of a drum?” set off research into spectral theory of partial differential equations, with the idea of understanding the extent to which the spectrum allows one to read back the geometry—in the end, the answer was “no”, in general. Kac completed his Ph.D in mathematics at the Polish University of Lwów in 1937 under the direction of Hugo Steinhaus (1887–1972) and became a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. After receiving his degree, he began to look for a position abroad and, in 1938, he was granted a scholarship from the Parnas Foundation which enabled him to go work in the US. He arrived in New York City just in time in November 1938. With the onset of World War II, Kac was able to stay in America, while his parents and brother who remained in Western Ukraine were murdered by the Germans in the mass executions in Krzemieniec in August 1942 during which the German paramilitary death squads killed all but 14 survivors from the about 15,000 people in the Krzemieniec Ghetto. From 1939 to 1961, he was at Cornell University, first as an instructor, from 1943, as an assistant professor, and from 1947 as full professor. He became a US citizen in 1943. In the academic year 1951/1952, Kac was on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1952, Kac, with Theodore H. Berlin, introduced the spherical model of a ferromagnet (a variant of the Ising model) and, with J. C. Ward, found an exact solution of the Ising model using a combinatorial method. In 1961, he left Cornell and went to Rockefeller University in New York city, where he worked with George Uhlenbeck (1900–1988) and Per Christian Hemmer (* 1933) on the mathematics of a van der Waals gas. After 20 years at Rockefeller University, he moved to the University of Southern California where he spent the last 3 years of his life. The claim that “a truth is a statement whose negation is false; a profound truth is a truth whose negation is also a profound truth.” is attributed to him, but also to Niels Bohr.
References
Bryant D, Moulton V (2004) Neighbor-net, an agglomerative method for the construction of phylogenetic networks. Mol Biol Evol 21:255–265
Domingo E, Sabo D, Taniguchi T, Weissmann C (1978) Nucleotide sequence heterogeneity of an RNA phage population. Cell 15:735–744
Ganguly N, Krüger T, Mukherjeeh A (2014) Epidemic spreading through direct and indirect interactions. Phys Rev E 90:032808
Halsall P (1993) https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/decameronintro.asp
Lange P, Nitz T (2003) Die letzte Pest in Thüringen (1681–1684), 11 pages, Blätter des Vereins für Thüringische Geschichte e.V., 13, H.2,
Levy D, Pachter L (2008) The Neighbor-Net Algorithm. https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0702515v2.pdf, p. 23
Saitou N, Nei M (1987) The neighbour-joining method: a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. Mol Biol Evol 4:406–425
Volchenkov D, Volchenkova L, Blanchard PH (2002) Epidemic spreading in a variety of scale-free networks. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlinear Soft Matter Phys 66(4):046137 (9 pages)
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to my good friends and close colleagues Stefan Grünewald, Jürgen Jost, Peter Serocka, ZENG Zhengbing, and many of the participants of Manfred Eigen's WINTER SEMINAR for always, over so many years, allowing me to ask so many stupid questions and answering them patiently, yet most of all, of course, to Manfred Eigen for all he did for me and, I suppose, to all of the contributors of this volume by explaining to us the universal mechanisms of evolution and self-organization of matter.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Special Issue: Chemical Kinetics, Biological Mechanisms and Molecular Evolution.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dress, A. Why, so far, have epidemics always eventually petered out? Quasispecies theory suggests a (testable!) answer. Eur Biophys J 47, 427–442 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00249-018-1306-2
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00249-018-1306-2