Texas flood ruined years of medical research
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HOUSTON - Try to put a value on the cure for a disease.
In some cases, numbers - at least 22 people killed and $2 billion in property damage - tell the story of heartache and loss in the Houston area because of Tropical Storm Allison and the pain that will be felt for years.
But researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston see an additional, devastating toll: the loss of key weapons in the worldwide battle against misery and illness.
As floodwaters poured into the Texas Medical Center, researchers lost tissue samples, long-term cell cultures, genetically engineered lab animals and, in one instance, data that took hundreds of people 25 years to accumulate.
"Incalculable," Dr. Jim Patrick, Baylor's vice president and dean of research, said of the loss.
The famous as well as the unknown were touched. Dr. Michael DeBakey lost a calf scheduled to test a heart-assist machine. Other work affected included research on breast cancer, infantile diarrhea, osteoporosis and asthma. Losses still are being tallied.
The University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and its valuable research were spared, but flood losses stunned both Baylor and the UT Health Science Center. Some doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers and others will have to restart work begun years ago. Careers will be altered, officials said.
"It's a tragedy, a scientific tragedy," said Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang, who heads the University of Chicago's Cancer Research Center, one of the network of institutions whose researchers often team with Baylor, UT and others to solve mysteries and create medical miracles.
Allison came ashore in Houston on June 5, packing minimal winds but a lot of rain. The storm stayed in the area for five days, unleashing its full fury the night of June 8.
The Texas Medical Center, home to 42 institutions, including some of the world's most important, suffered a knockout blow when 8.5 inches of rain fell from midnight to 2 a.m. June 9. Flood defenses were overwhelmed, and power was knocked out.
Basements of several institutions - including Baylor and the UT Health Science Center - were flooded, and that's where much of the key data was kept.
As floodwaters were pumped out, Baylor researchers discovered more than 30,000 caged rats, mice and other animals had drowned. Cell cultures in incubators were swamped and compromised. Tissue samples in freezers that weren't swamped warmed to dangerous temperatures.
At the UT Health Science Center, about 5,000 monkeys, dogs and other animals drowned, and other data were lost.
At Baylor, Katherina Walz, a 33-year-old postdoctoral researcher, was one of the most devastated.
For 2½ years, she had labored to breed mice with a particular genetic flaw believed to be key to mental retardation in humans. She had 150 carefully nurtured animals in cages in a basement lab at Baylor.
Although she knew there was a storm, she thought her mice were safe until a fellow researcher brought her the horrifying news: 147 had drowned.
"All of Saturday, I was crying," Walz said.
The damage has taken such a toll on morale that Baylor's psychiatric staff has offered counseling.
UT Health Science Center's preliminary estimate on damage was at least $72 million. Baylor estimates were incomplete but were expected to add many millions.
The effects almost certainly will reach beyond Houston, said Carol Alderson, a grants-policy official with the National Institutes of Health, who called the Texas Medical Center "one of the heartbeats" of medical research.
One of the most serious blows at Baylor was to breast-cancer research. In the past 25 years, scientists have collected about 60,000 breast-tumor samples, kept in 30 freezers in a basement lab.
The samples are valuable because when researchers find a new suspected factor in disease, they can look back to see if that factor was present in samples.
Also set back was a 10-year-old Baylor program on infantile diarrhea, one of the major killers of children elsewhere in the world.
At the UT Health Science Center, asthma research was set back when genetically engineered animals were lost. The center also suffered setbacks in other programs, including behavioral-science studies, officials said.
There was some good news. Baylor's research into the human genetic code - as a key participant in the Human Genome Project - was untouched.
More than 120,000 other lab animals escaped flooding in a new facility at Baylor, a major supplier of lab animals to institutions around the world.
Phone calls have come in from across the nation, with fellow researchers giving advice on how to recover damaged data and offering tissue samples.
Teamwork at the medical center warmed hearts. More than 25 tons of dry ice was trucked in, and medical students, doctors in training, staff members and volunteers have been carrying it up hot, dark stairways and down dank corridors to try to minimize losses.
A week after the flood, Walz, the young researcher, was trying to look ahead.
It will take her six months to get back to where she was before the disaster, she said, but three of her 150 specially bred mice survived, so she at least has a start. And she's been buoyed by the can-do spirit pervading the flooded but unbowed medical center.
Mona Shahbazian, 37, a doctoral candidate studying a nerve disorder called Rett's syndrome, agreed.
"It's a lot of heartache and disappointment, but we need to do the best we can and move on," she said.