Losing His Sight, a Scientist Sees an End to a Deadly Disease
Losing His Sight, a Scientist Sees an End to a Deadly Disease
Bill Jacobs lights the way to better tuberculosis drugs.
Twenty years ago, Bill Jacobs made the tuberculosis bug glow. It was like mounting a pair of headlights on a man-eating tiger. One of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases could no longer slink around in the shadows, evading its trackers. Microbiologists could now peer into a microscope to see if a particular antibiotic turned out the lights—that is, killed the TB bacteria. Or at least they could do this so long as they didn’t happen to be Bill Jacobs. That’s because when Bill Jacobs looked into the microscope at his own creation, he couldn’t see a thing. He was going blind.
When Jacobs looks at me today, first he sees my left eyeball, then he sees my nose, then, my lips. He sees the world in pieces. One. Piece. At a time. Imagine rolling up a magazine and holding it to your eye. That’s what Bill Jacobs sees. His field of vision is a pinhole of clarity no more than a few inches wide and shaped like an amoeba. A genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa has long since destroyed the rod photoreceptors in his eyes, which is why he can’t see under the dim light of a microscope, and it is now eating away at last of his color-sensing cones.
When I look at Jacobs, I see a man in a sage-colored sweater with snowy white hair hunched over his desk, squinting and pecking at a canary yellow keyboard with oversized letters on it. We’re inside his laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and I watch Jacobs as he moves the mouse pointer to the upper left corner of the screen so that he can find it in his tunnel of vision. Then, he clicks on a scientific paper and listens as a female voice comes out of his computer speakers, enunciating scientific terms and abbreviations with all the panache of C-3P0. It’s hard to believe that this is how one of the world’s premier TB investigators gets his work done. “It is what it is,” he says in his charmingly low-key way. “At least, I can hear.”