As a boy, George Happ wandered the wooded ravines of Southwestern Illinois. He attended a two-room grade school in a small village on the Mississippi River. At Principia College, he studied ecology and at Cornell University, Tom Eisner introduced him to evolution, behavior and physiology. Following faculty appointments in Washington, D.C., New York City, Fort Collins, and Vermont, Happ became affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1994. His leadership at UAF helped in securing funding for the West Ridge Research Building, developing the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research and establishing the IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence. Themes of Alaska EPSCoR 1 & 2 were engineering, genetics, bioinformatics and physiology. The INBRE program built biomedicine by addressing environmental stressors—contaminants and infectious microbes that impact people as well as wildlife. Happ retired from UAF in 2009, but can still be found dedicating his time and expertise to furthering UAF research.

Sharpton: Let’s start with what caused you to wash up on the shores of Alaska.

Happ: We like sled dogs. I felt like I’d done about all that I could do that was new and interesting in Vermont. I’d been chair of the department there for 17 years, hiring over half of the faculty who became well funded.  Our strong curriculum was respected across the campus. My lab had remained active through NIH-R01 awards for research on insect development and reproductive physiology and I enjoyed teaching the core course in cell biology. But it seemed time to look for new challenges and when we had the sudden opportunity to retire early in 1995, Alaska appealed. Sled dogs sounded like fun too.

Sharpton: Had you done any sledding before you came to Alaska?

Happ: Yes, we got into it in about 1990 in Vermont. We bought all our dogs from Alaska, because this was the place to get the best dogs.  We came up here in 1994 on sabbatical to try to figure out if we would eventually retire in Fairbanks or if it would be too miserably cold. We decided we liked Fairbanks a lot.

While we were here on that 1994 sabbatical, we had skied in Goldstream Valley and found the land that we subsequently bought in May 1995. We moved into a wall tent on the property that August and into the partly completed house on the evening of an earthquake in October.

Sharpton: And how did you develop a relationship with UAF?

Happ: Well, the sabbatical was at UAF, and Bob White gave me a little office. John Blake and I got to know each other. During that sabbatical year, I did research on dog science—dog nutrition and exercise physiology, actually. It was fun.

When we decided to move up here I brought some of my lab equipment with me. John Blake generously offered space in animal quarters. Much of that equipment is scattered across campus, still useful in faculty labs.

In the late 90’s, the Department of Biology and Wildlife at UAF needed someone to teach cell biology. The course hadn’t been taught here for three years. At CSU and at Vermont, cell was a required course for all the life science majors that I had taught for decades. So I agreed.

Sharpton: So now, as director of both INBRE and EPSCoR, you’ve had oversight responsibilities of each of these multi-million-dollar programs and huge statewide responsibilities, and yet you’ve managed to carry on research activities. How do you balance your administrative responsibilities with your drive to conduct research?

Happ: Well I think faculty are firstly academic beasts who teach and do research as well as offer service.  Faculty are professional multitaskers. I strongly believe that people who “move up” into administrative positions can and should keep their research programs going. With my position as EPSCoR and INBRE director I could always carve out some time to think about science, just as I had while being chair of zoology at Vermont.  It was harder to find that time while I was vice provost for research in Vermont. 

In my experience, many of the best academic leaders I’ve known are people who have kept their own laboratories’ programs running while being administrators.

Sharpton: In regards to faculty experience, let’s talk a little bit about your research. We’re now in the middle of a global epidemic of H1N1, 2009 H1N1. Just a few years ago there was grave concern about H5N1, avian influenza. How do those two compare in terms of their potential global devastation, and what’s going on with H5N1 now that everyone’s attention has turned to the swine flu?

Happ: It’s still cropping up. H5N1 is killing a fair number of birds in Russia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Southeast Asia. It seems to have passed its peak, but no one really knows how pandemic strains arise or how to predict them.

There are a large number of infectious microbes circulating in wild animals. We don’t really know what’s out there in the wild birds or other hosts, for example in bats that are hosts for deadly viruses like ebola.
With each disease outbreak, we find out more.  In the case of the 1918 flu, it was thought to be a bacterium during the pandemic. Flu wasn’t widely recognized as a viral diseases until the early 1930s . Even today, we lack fundamental knowledge about how disease agents evolve in nature and how they cross species barriers.

Devastating diseases, poster children for research, justify major research investments that reveal much about the biology of agents that cause disease, the pathology in people and the ways we can fight back. In 2010, we have a much better understanding of molecular biology than we had in 1918 or even 50 years ago. But we don’t know enough of the mechanics of how any bacterium or virus really works inside the cell.

A flu virus contains eight segments of RNA. There are essentially eight little chromosomes that have to go into every new flu virus that is being formed by being budded off from a cell. There are 11 different genes on those eight segments. What’s happening inside the cell? The cell is busy manufacturing the RNA that has to go into the flu virus. So the cell has thousands of copies of each of these eight different RNAs flowing around.

When each new flu virus particle is exported by a cell, it contains one copy each of segments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. How that new virus selects for those eight specific segments—it doesn’t get two of number seven and none of number eight—we don’t fully understand.  We’ve got to work long and hard on the basic mechanisms in order to to disrupt them. We need to do more than just study a disease for the few years while it’s a public health crisis.

From the point of view of science, AIDS has been a wonderful opportunity—a disease that was so dire and so ominous that it led to a huge increase in funding that has revealed so much new knowledge about the ways the immune system works and can be manipulated.

Eventually, I think, there will be some kind of vaccine for AIDS. That will reflect profound improvements in basic immunology. But it takes the extended concentrated investments devoted to HIV/AIDS and pathogens like the malaria parasite. AIDS and malaria are classic examples of public health diseases with very different infectious agents. As we focus on such major scourges, we’ll also gain basic knowledge of cell and molecular biology that helps us understand a lot of other diseases.

The cross-species transmission questions are intellectually fascinating and of critical importance to human health. The 1918 H1N1 strain was easily transmissible from person to person, but the current strain of H1N1, often called “swine flu”, doesn’t spread so efficiently nor cause such severe symptoms. And thus far, H5N1 really doesn’t get to people very easily; it’s really mostly a bird disease.

Sharpton: So you have to be in close proximity to the birds?

Happ: Most of the human cases involve close proximity to birds and also people with weak defenses; you are susceptible if you are immunosuppressed.

Sharpton: But it’s much more deadly.

Happ: Yes, a much higher percentage of the people who get H5N1 die. But with H1N1, in the current version, mortality is lower. The 1918 H1N1 version was devastating because it created an overreaction triggering an immune storm that caused extensive bleeding in the lungs and elsewhere and led to death.

Sharpton: Interesting. So now that you’re retired, you’ll probably be working a bit less, but I suspect you’ll carry on some research activities?

Happ: Well, a couple of things, actually. Karsten Hueffer has greatly expanded and strengthened the research we initiated here on tularemia (rabbit fever) and so that theme can prosper. In a similar vein, Jon Runstadler has built an influenza program with a major flu subcontract now, working with an NIH center at Mt. Sinai Medical School and focused on monitoring flu in Alaska, Russia, and in northern Japan (Hokkaido). We’ve got excellent working relationships with Japan and a collaborative agreement between UAF and Novosibirsk State University. Jon is building a multi-faceted research program; he has shown that Minto Flats is a real hot spot for flu viruses in wild birds.

But, to tell the truth, I’m still fascinated by bird behavior that interested me as an undergraduate. Bird behavior is potentially much more interesting now than in the 1960s. When I went to graduate school, birds were regarded as reflex machines with very limited mental capacities. Most scientists were very conservative. They assumed the minimum about what goes on inside the bird or mammal brain, except for primates. They argued that you can’t prove that there is some kind of emotion or cognition involved because you can’t get inside the brain, and therefore for birds, there is little emotion or cognition. It’s just reflex.

But neuroscience, molecular genetics and also field observations have been transformative over that past half century. 

Do crows or jays have emotion and cognition? Fifty years ago, most scientists would have said “no” to cognition, because we can’t get inside the birds’ minds. But let’s be fair: I can’t really know what’s going on inside your brain.

Sharpton: Right.

Happ: I have to infer from your behavior. And that’s exactly what you have to do also for me. But I can be somewhat confident that I do know a fair amount about your thought processes because my brain is roughly like your brain. It’s harder when it’s the brain of another species.

Neuroscience is very exciting now. First, functional neuroanatomy has gotten a lot more sophisticated so you can look inside brains with imaging technologies and begin to associate emotions or motor activity with particular areas. And second, there’s wider recognition that since our cognitive and emotional abilities have evolved from common ancestors we share a lot of basic functions with other animals. Third, molecular biology reveals patterns of gene expressions that lets us identify deep commonalities. Birds are really sophisticated dinosaurs who evolved their brains in a different way
than did mammals like us. In the 21st century, subtle and speculative behavioral questions can be approached semi-respectively. I’m just sort of wondering what makes birds tick.

And at the same time, my wife Christy has gotten very much into photography, and as a biologist she has many biological observations from her work.  I certainly don’t intend to do intrusive research on bird brains, but rather to observe in the field. And I can reason from the rich new knowledge on bird neuroscience. Perhaps it’s just an old man in his dotage sort of revisiting his youth.

Sharpton: I think that’s an outstanding strategy you’ve got there and I personally look forward to seeing you around here as long as I’m here and beyond, probably. So don’t give up coming in and doing some research here as well.