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THE NAI PROFILE 647

the gaps and help with whatever is necessary, whether biosensors increasingly user friendly. To me, it was
it’s project management, writing proposals, writing a relief when other people started losing sleep over
papers, or mentoring the postdocs or the students to the threat of bioterriorism, appreciated the need for
do what they need to do to further their careers— a practical detection system, and explored a variety
basically filling in the gaps. of approaches for biothreat detection.
I also do a lot of bridging, so if a project needs a The current problem dominating biodefense
particular expertise, I help find that expertise and considerations is that the biothreats themselves are
bring in those collaborators, both from within North moving targets. The biotech industry has moved so
Carolina and outside. Some faculty members need fast in terms of providing tools for new (and very
that help, and some of them don’t. useful) product design, and making these tools easy
I also try to ask the questions that a younger sci- to use, that I don’t think the security community will
entist or engineer might not have thought about yet. ever catch up with the capability of biowarfare in
I have a broader perspective than most faculty mem- terms of defense. What we can do is learn a lot from
bers on what it takes to get things into the hands of pandemics and how they move through a community.
the users or into a corporate environment, how to If we can defend ourselves against Mother Nature,
deal with the legal aspects of patents or contracts, we can also defend ourselves against bioterrorists. I
or how to find the people that know how to do that. think that that realization has become more perva-
Probably the most valuable thing I do is ask questions. sive, and the medical community has become much
more involved in biodefense than they used to be,
T&I: Just as now, your earlier work with biosen- and I think that’s necessary.
sors was very diverse, covering food safety, disease The idea of trying to have a monitor that will
diagnosis, and pollution control, among other areas. protect you against everything a bioterrorist might
However, I was particularly drawn, probably because produce is not very practical anymore. You really
of our historical moment, to the work you have done have to know what you’re looking for ahead of time.
on biological terrorism defense. How did that work If the intelligence community can tell us what we’re
on biosensors respond to the increased threats of up against, that’s fine. We can build a sensor for
bioterrorism that we face in our modern times? almost anything, but we cannot build sensors against

Ligler: The time period for that work spans 27 years. everything.
When we first started out, lasers were huge devices, T&I: It’s analogous in a lot of ways to hackers and
and we were going to put one in the middle of the computer viruses. We try to stay one step ahead of the
ship and dangle fibers out of the portholes. It was ever-evolving viruses by creating systems to defend
that crude. I realized that we could use antibodies against them, but there is always another one around
to recognize toxins and biological molecules and the corner.
convert the recognition event to an optical signal.
So, we worked very closely with the people in the Ligler: Yes, we probably have a little longer time
optical sciences to take advantage of the develop- factor than those fighting computer viruses do, but
ments in the telecommunications industry and make the idea is the same. But, again, we have a wonderful
biosensors smaller and more portable. The manu- model in what Mother Nature does; she’s a terrifying
ally operated biosensor that went to the first Persian terrorist. So, if we practice defense with Ebola, SARS,
Gulf War weighed 150 pounds and would keep your and Zika and learn from those kinds of situations,
tent warm at night. The technology advanced a long those lessons will help us as much as anything.
way very rapidly; by the mid-90s, we had made bio- T&I: Branching out from the science, I was wonder-
sensors with increased capability that weighed less ing if you could talk about this joint appointment you
than 10 pounds, were fully automated, and could fit have with NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill and the
on a small drone. We continued to take advantage role you play in stimulating translational research by
of the technology that came out of the cell phone linking those two institutions.
industry and the communications industry to make