The first known victim of severe acute respiratory syndrome was Johnny Chen, a Chinese American businessman living in Hong Kong. He apparently picked up SARS at a hotel in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Then he traveled from Hong Kong to Hanoi, where he was admitted to a hospital on February 26. In less than a month, hundreds of people were sick on three continents.Virologist David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology, says SARS is not the first disease to spread rapidly via air travel—AIDS was. Baltimore shared a Nobel Prize in 1975 for his discovery of reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that viruses like HIV use to insert their genetic material into a host's cell. Molecular biologists now use it to engineer new genes and novel organisms. Several months ago, Baltimore criticized the media for overreacting to SARS. He says the disease was never a threat in the United States.
Photograph courtesy of California Institute of Technology.
