By Jared S. Hopkins
A half-century ago, freshman Barney Graham rolled onto the Rice
University campus in a new 1971 Ford Mustang. To blow off steam
that year, he launched water balloons off the dorm roof with his
new roommate Bill Gruber, who drove a hand-me-down Dodge
Monaco.
Barney, a top high-school athlete and valedictorian from a
family farm in Kansas, starred in intramural sports at Rice. Bill,
a high-school academic star from a Houston suburb, said Barney made
up for his own athletic deficiencies when they played football and
softball.
Barney recalled thinking when they met that Bill probably "knew
a lot more than I did, and I was going to have to work hard to
catch up." He turned to Bill for help keeping pace with math and
science courses, while at the same time trying to outdo his
roommate. "We were very competitive, but I think in a good way,"
Bill said, "We wanted to be the best, frankly, at knowing
everything related to science."
Last year, the two men returned to competition, this time in a
race to stop the pandemic.
When Moderna Inc. announced in November that its vaccine had
proved highly effective against Covid-19, Dr. Barney Graham, a
government scientist who helped design the shot, emailed his old
pal. Dr. Bill Gruber ran the clinical trials of the vaccine from
Pfizer Inc., which had announced its own similarly impressive
results a week earlier.
"I'm glad we were able to keep up with you," Dr. Graham, a
laconic 67-year-old, wrote the fast-talking Dr. Gruber, 68.
The two men recalled their time together as 18-year-old
freshmen, spanning various areas of competition, grades, and
collaboration, studies and mischief.
One of their first trial-and-error experiments came from trying
to wring more space from their cramped dorm room. Their idea: drill
holes in the concrete ceiling and hang their beds up high with
metal chains. "I had just come from a farm, and I thought I could
rig up just about anything, " Dr. Graham said.
They hoisted the beds on the chains and slept soundly for weeks.
One night, Dr. Gruber's bed came untethered, sending him crashing
into his desk below. The roommates made some design tweaks, and the
beds remained suspended through graduation four years later.
The two men lost track of one another after leaving Rice for
medical school, Dr. Graham at the University of Kansas, Dr. Gruber
at Baylor College of Medicine.
At a 1986 medical conference in New Orleans, Dr. Gruber, then a
pediatrician at Baylor, was setting up a display of research
findings for an illness called respiratory syncytial virus, known
as RSV, that can kill infants and the elderly. He was shocked to
see his former roommate standing next to him, showing his own
research on the same virus.
"It was a pretty remarkable coincidence," said Dr. Graham, who
was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt's vaccine research center
at the time. The two men caught up, and Dr. Gruber soon joined Dr.
Graham at Vanderbilt.
They remained in Nashville through the 1990s and occasionally
co-wrote papers on virus research, a field they had found
independently.
"We're almost like the double helix," Dr. Gruber said, not
surprisingly using a DNA analogy. "We spread apart and come back
together, spread apart and come back together."
In 1999, Dr. Gruber left for to pursue vaccine development at
drugmaker Wyeth (later acquired by Pfizer). A year later, Dr.
Graham joined a new vaccine research center at the National
Institutes of Health. Again, years passed with little contact.
Dr. Graham's lab made a breakthrough in 2013 regarding the
structure of an important protein in the RSV virus, a finding that
laid the groundwork to understanding the spike protein in the new
coronavirus.
He couldn't present his findings at a planned medical conference
because of a two-week government shutdown that kept federal
employees from traveling. He and his wife instead used the time for
a road trip that took them close to Dr. Gruber's house in upstate
New York. Dr. Graham left a voice mail. Dr. Gruber called back and
invited the couple to his house for dinner.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Dr. Gruber said he heard about his
former roommate's breakthrough research. Dr. Graham opened his
laptop and flipped through the PowerPoint slides on the RSV virus
he had prepared for the conference. "I can kind of hear the echo of
my wife saying, 'Why are we talking about this during dinner?' " he
recalled.
Dr. Gruber sent a team from Pfizer to visit Dr. Graham's
government lab in Maryland to discuss the research. Pfizer relied
on the lab's advances to develop its own RSV vaccine, which is now
in human testing.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought the two men together one more
time.
Dr. Graham's lab joined with Moderna to design a vaccine using a
new and unproven gene-based technology called mRNA. The day after
the Moderna vaccine began human trials in March, Pfizer announced
its own vaccine partnership with BioNTech SE, also using mRNA.
They spoke by phone a few times each month, discussing the
biology of the virus and its impact on their lives. They exchanged
emails and texts as the global death toll rose into the hundreds of
thousands.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines started late-stage, or Phase 3,
trials the same day in July. In early November, Pfizer announced
its positive results, and a month later was cleared for use by the
Food and Drug Administration. Moderna's authorization followed by a
week.
"The fact is that we both want everybody to win here," said Dr.
Graham, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center.
Looking back, Dr. Graham said, he and Dr. Gruber "marvel at how
over 50 years this all transpired."
When the topic of their competitive spirit came up during a Rice
alumni panel last year, Dr. Gruber joked how Dr. Graham had
reminded him how Pfizer's trial started several hours behind
Moderna's.
Dr. Gruber also offered this advice to the students listening
in.
"Get along with your fellow roommates," he said, "you just never
know where that path is going to lead."
Write to Jared S. Hopkins at jared.hopkins@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 25, 2021 11:37 ET (15:37 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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