STUART LEVY
Professor of Medicine, Molecular Biology and
Microbiology, Public Health and Community Medicine
Tufts University School of Medicine
Director, Center for Adaptation Genetics
and Drug Resistance
Boston, MassachusettsALONSO NICHOLS/TUFTS UNIVERSITYAs a visiting research fellow at the Pasteur Institute in 1962, on leave from medical school, Stuart Levy met a Japanese scientist who introduced him to an exciting recent breakthrough by researchers from his country. “The Japanese had discovered that resistance to antibiotics could be transferred from one bacterium to another,” Levy says—even across species. “This was unheard of previously. It was the beginning of studies on transferrable drug-resistance genes and infectious drug resistance.” Inspired, Levy traveled to Tokyo’s Keio University in 1964 and spent several months in Tsutomu Watanabe’s laboratory, working on the so-called R (resistance) factors. Watanabe is credited with bringing the topic to a wide scientific audience with the publication of a 1963 review in English, highlighting the results of Japanese research on what he called the “infective heredity” of multidrug resistance.
Levy published several papers with Watanabe, including a description of episomal resistance factors of Enterobacteriaceae and an investigation of methods for inhibiting their transfer. “We didn’t know at the time about the mechanism, but we knew it was an exciting moment in the history of antibiotics and resistance,” says Levy. “Later, transfer was linked to small pieces of DNA—plasmids—that bore different resistances to antibiotics.”
Here, Levy talks about the prank he and his twin brother (Jay Levy, who was among the first to discover the HIV virus) executed that earned them a brief spot in the limelight; how science allowed him to travel the world—and befriend Samuel Beckett; and an urgent call to a castle in Prague about chicken eggs.
Sunday mornings. As young kids ...
