Microbiology

Interview Q&A

* The interview with CPT Green was requested to be accessed only by students, so a transcript is provided below. (interview video submitted in Canvas submission)*

Can you briefly describe what you do in your profession?

I am an army microbiologist, and my profession deals predominantly either with microbiology labs and research centers, like USAMRIID or RARE, which is different DOD research, or we deal with clinical laboratories in hospitals. What I do explicitly is run the microbiology laboratories in those facilities. I am a clinical microbiologist by trade, I suppose, so my job is to run clinical laboratories. We deal with public health and infectious diseases quite a bit.

Can you describe a typical day or week in your role?

I don't have a typical day or week, which is kind of nice but aggravating. Other parts of the lab have very standardized and structured exceptions, and they have a day-to-day environment. In microbiology, we get samples of all different shapes and sizes, and depending on what we're trying to isolate or grow, some things need this material, some things need that material, and we're always running into problems here or there. So sometimes I'm running around trying to find a missing refrigerator. Sometimes, I'm running around trying to fix a refrigerator, get our BSL 3 to work, get equipment, deal with union stuff, or deal with just paperwork. Some days, it's monotonous and drones on; other days, it is extremely exciting and fast-paced.

How is your undergraduate education helpful in what you do right now?

I spent most of my undergraduate education going to Wake Forest University, where I majored in biology. As an undergrad, I spent most of my time researching. I was the opposite of a bad student; it was not that I was a good student; it was that while most students were skipping class to do bad things, my main focus was research. I was more inclined to be in a research lab researching than studying. It didn't help too much in terms of what I do now. Research and clinical microbiology, I like to liken it to, like, let's say, I went to school for Latin, and I am a fluent Latin speaker. Well, clinical microbiology is like Portuguese. Technically, they're related. To the uninitiated, they seem really similar, but to those of us that spend a lot of time in our respective languages they are not very similar. When I got here, it was a whole new world of learning and change. That's one of the fun things about the Army. They'll take you and throw you into a circumstance where you don't know what to do, and they say to figure it out, which is one of the things I enjoy, especially as I have the opportunity to lead my team.

What is any advice that you wish you had received in college that would be useful for you now?

It's kind of weird because I joined ROTC at 18 because I wanted to become an army microbiologist, so there isn't anything in my life that I would have changed in college because, ultimately, I ended up exactly where I wanted to be. Now, the advice that I would tell my younger self is to study more just because why not? It doesn't hurt to study more. I tell a lot of college students that when I ask what their GPA is, they say oh, 3.9; I'm like, okay, stop studying so much, go have fun. You need to not be a boring person, This is not to say 3.9 GPAs are boring people, but you can get away with a 3.7 and have more fun memories in college. In my experience, your dream job may not end up being exactly what you want it to be and what you always need, but you need to have the ability to understand sometimes where you want to be and where you need to be changed. For example, hypothetically, I am not saying this is true, but let's say I didn't want to be in the Army anymore; the Army was definitely good for me for a time, but perhaps it's time for me in the future to find something else. It's always good to take opportunities, use them to your advantage, and use them to help others as much as you can. At the same time, understand that For Better or Worse, nothing in this life is permanent, so sometimes you have to be the change and Chase the next opportunity that may be better for what you want.

What are some common misconceptions people may have about microbiology?

In the Army, when I tell people I'm an army microbiologist, I normally try not to tell people that because their mind rushes with the idea of biological warfare and all this cool stuff. I'm like, no, that doesn't happen, that isn't legal. We don't do any of that. I work in a hospital. I am not that guy; I'm a physician, not some Secret Squirrel door-kicking CIA guy. Nobody Does that. A misconception I think people have of the biological sciences is that you can learn it easily. I wish that was the case. Nobody's that good at biology by yourself because there's the book aspect, but there's also the lab aspect. You can't learn the lab aspect in a book, so there's really no way to skip that part.

We know that biology and microbiology is constantly evolving, so are there any emerging topics that you find particularly interesting or promising?

Yes, so microbiology, of course, covers anything biological that we can't see with our eyes. I deal with infectious disease microbiology exclusively, but one of my colleagues whom I adore is in the Navy. He's a Navy microbiologist. He was a Ph.D. scientist and had a 15-year career before he joined the Navy. He studied Oceanic fungi, funguses that lived in the ocean as that exist. Yeah, that exists! I didn't know that until he told me. What I find most exciting is that if you look in any direction, whether in space, underground, or on the Earth, you will find a new field of microbiology if you look hard. The practical side is how many people think the new push for immunotherapy is very prudent. I love the idea of immunotherapy; it is a very, very good idea. You can wow your friends and family with your microbiology knowledge, so anytime you introduce a selective pressure into an organism, into a system, you are going to provide a pathway for evolution. What we're seeing, and people called me mad when I said this before, so you've heard of the antiretroviral therapies for HIV, which I'll spare the like 4-hour lecture, but it locks HIV in the cells so that it can't proliferate and infect people. Well, I was saying years ago that this is only a temporary fix; it isn't a permanent fix, and sure enough, we're seeing all across the world resistant strains of HIV to these retroviral therapies. I think that is not going to be a huge, huge problem because we have a product we can just tweak a little bit and get it to work again. This ties back into an interesting thing about the practicality of microbiology. Everything you do to try to stop microbiology will fail every single time forever, so it never stops.

As you mentioned earlier, microbiology requires a team, so, what role do you think mentorship and collaboration play in your career and research journey?

Well, I think it is incredibly important to have mentorship and collaboration. I have not had the most experience with it as an adult just because I found myself in situations where I've had to exercise something in the Army called disciplined initiative: what do you do in the absence of orders? I've spent most of my career in the Army exercising disciplined initiative, so I haven't had the strongest mentorship or collaboration, but my opinion is that it is incredibly important. That's one of the reasons I bother the AIT privates like private Perikh can attest, because I want to do my part to change the culture in a positive way that we should be collaborating. I don't think we should compete, especially for science, so I would charge all of you to do your best to maintain a collaborative mindset because I have seen very few instances where competition is better than collaboration.

What do you envision for the future of microbiology, and how do you see your role evolving within it?

My role, I do not know. The military is going through a lot of changes in terms of how they view the importance of infectious disease and clinical agnostics. The bottom line is that it will be better for our country, which is what matters. Will it be better for my MOS? Who's to say, but I'm young enough that I don't really care. I'll figure out some way to feed my family. For clinical Diagnostics, I would say we are going to see the end of the agar plate within your lifetime. I think PCR is going to become easier, cheaper, and quicker, so most tests that we run that involve growing things or looking for things, whatever that is, will be PCR-based. I do think that's going to happen, and already, within my two years at Walter Reed, I've seen PCRs become more and more prevalent. On the civilian side, civilian hospitals don't have to ask Congress or the Senate, "Hey, can we do this? Is this the right thing?" They can just snap their fingers and do it. When it comes to buying machines, we can't just buy new machines. We have to be very careful about what we buy and how we buy it. A big hospital can just say hey, here's money. Give me that refrigerator. When I've been going around and getting tours of local laboratories that are in normal civilian hospitals, they're moving more towards Automation and PCR. I think those are the two big things.

What is the coolest organism you've had to look at?

We get cool stuff all the time, so that's a good question because it kind of varies. It all is the coolest thing until you see it, and then something else becomes the coolest thing. I will say the thing that I will never forget is the first time I saw Pseudomonas aeruginosa. What does Pseudomonas smell like? Grapes, exactly, and I remember being taught that in a class in grad school, and I'm like, "bacteria have smells?" and then I open up the plate, and I'm like, wow, this smells like artificial grapes. Another guy could rattle off different cool genus and species, but that's not what's interesting to me. What's interesting the most is that when you get something, look at it and wonder how this happens. We had a case yesterday where this is one of the Captain Green; we need you type cases. We had Staphylococcus lugdunensis, which, in terms of diagnosis, is an infectious disease, is not the worst one to have; it is clinically relevant and can cause some nasty syndromes, but it is fairly antibiotic susceptible. That's a good thing about it. They can have different morphologies, so we had a couple of colonies on a plate that looked so different that I thought they were a different genus altogether. Turns out, no they're the same genus and species. That's just crazy how some bacteria can do that, and it's things like that all the time, different parasites, and this and that, and wow, that's a worm that came out. It's like there's all sorts of cool stuff all the time. We see something that a textbook will say you'll never see, and then right there, it's there, so it's fun.

By: Alex Morales, Aneri Parikh, Aashan Liaqat, Isha Subedi

Created Spring 2024 for BIO 311C Group Project (K. Sathasivan)