>>13801766
>>13801730
cont:
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.
Bill Gruber, far left, and Barney Graham, far right, with friends in 1975.
PHOTO: BILL GRUBER
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 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.
President Joe Biden fist bumps Dr. Barney Graham during a Feb. 11 visit to the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Mr. Biden was joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, right.
PHOTO: OLIVER CONTRERAS/CNP/ZUMA PRESS
Dr. Graham’s lab made a breakthrough in 2013 regarding the structure of an important protein in RSV, 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 RSV 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.
cont: