Abstract
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Gerry played a critical role in the foundational science of HIV, and his work has left a powerful legacy. He was among the first people to fully realize the implications of HIV diversity, grasping immediately that this virus was going to present a great challenge for vaccine design. This came about because in 1986 he was working in the theoretical biology group at Los Alamos at GenBank (GenBank was then housed in Los Alamos, where it was founded), where he was studying the evolution of gene families across organisms. He learned that several HIV sequences had become available, and he encouraged his daughter to take a look at them for a science fair project. Through this serendipitous event, he took a close look at HIV sequence alignments, and was struck by the extent of the genetic differences between the earliest US/French HIV isolates and African HIV isolates. He understood immediately that this was an extraordinary virus, and that more than just a simple sequence repository would be valuable resource to the research community. So he made a case to the NIH for creating a specialized database of HIV sequences, a resource that could be shared by researchers around the globe. With the backing and support of Howard Temin, and the support of Wayne Koff, who was then at the NIH, he founded the Los Alamos HIV Sequence Database and Analysis Project in 1987. The Los Alamos HIV database was the first pathogen database, and served as a model for this kind of resource. Specialized pathogen databases have now become commonplace, following this lead. The impact of his work thus goes well beyond HIV.
In its pre-internet days, the HIV database was provided only as a published compendium of annotated alignments of all HIV sequences; hard copies of the compendium could be found in virtually every HIV laboratory in the world (as a testament to their worth, you sometimes would find them chained to people's desks so others wouldn't lift them). This global effort stemmed from Gerry's tiny office, located in a small trailer perched at the far end of a parking lot at Los Alamos National Lab. A few steps beyond the trailer, was a 1,000 foot drop into one of the many beautiful canyons that score the northern New Mexico landscape, an environment that Gerry loved.
HIV presents unique bioinformatic challenges from a database perspective. It evolves by insertion and deletion and recombination, as well as by point mutation. Many of the valid sequences in the literature and GenBank are nonfunctional, with lethal frame shifting insertions and deletions and stop-codons interrupting the protein sequence. These can be natural mutations, as many of the circulating viruses in infected individuals are nonfunctional, but they pose special problems for HIV curation and alignment that Gerry understood and addressed from the beginning of the database project. As the sequencing technology advanced and the internet changed our way of doing science, Myers adapted the database, creating a global relational database with web-based access and analysis tools, and leading the field into a new era.
More than just his baseline work on the HIV database, he helped bring phylogenetics into the study of HIV, and taught hundreds of us how to read a phylogenetic tree, opening lectures with the definition, “Clade, from the Greek klados, or branch…”. He conducted his own research on global HIV diversity, and brought leadership and consensus to the community through suggesting the currently used nomenclature system of HIV clades and subtypes. He also did groundbreaking work with the Centers for Disease Control on the Florida dentist case in 1990, showing for the first time that sequence relationships could be used to establish linkage between infections in a critical public health inquiry.
As a professor at St. John's College in Santa Fe, and as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Gerry Myers (right) was an inspirational and good natured mentor to a whole generation of students and postgraduates who passed through his classroom and office. In this 1989 photo are C. Randal Linder (left) and Kersti A. Rock (center).
Myers was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1937. He held a doctorate from the University of Colorado Medical School and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in molecular biophysics at Yale University. After teaching philosophy, literature, mathematics, and science at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. He was named Laboratory Fellow in 1994. Los Alamos remains the home of the global HIV genetic sequence database, although Gerry left the HIV database project in 1997, and went on to lead databases on oral microbial pathogens and bacterial STDs at Los Alamos. He also ran a bioinformatics and computational biology program for the Department of Energy and USAMRIID.
After retiring, Myers took up weaving, and found more time for hiking and fishing. He is survived by his wife, Lynda, his mother, Estelle White, sons Noah and wife Rakhi, Dane and wife Melinda, daughters Geneva and Kendra, daughter-in-law Michelle, granddaughters Emily, Madeleine, and Natalie, and grandsons Amar and Kavi. He was a wonderful mentor to all of us who he brought to Northern New Mexico and Los Alamos, who continue his legacy and our work at the HIV database project: Carla Kuiken, Thomas Leitner, Brian Foley, and Bette Korber.