In 2006 Duke University clinician Vance Fowler found the perfect animal model to investigate a question that had been bugging him ever since he started his residency at the university’s medical school in the mid-1990s: Why were some patients much better at fighting off bacterial infections than others?
Scanning research on more than 20 different inbred mouse strains, Fowler learned that they had a dramatic range of response to infection with the gram-positive bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. At one extreme was a strain that easily succumbed to infection: A/J (commonly used in cancer and immunology research because of its propensity to develop tumors). At the other was a highly resistant strain called C57BL/6J—the mouse strain most widely used in research.
As a clinician with no lab of his own, however, Fowler relied on longtime collaborator and then head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), David Schwartz, for bench ...
