POSTED: 4:14 p.m. EST March 21, 2003 UPDATED: 11:48 p.m. EST March 21, 2003
BALTIMORE -- One of the first American casualties in the war against Iraq is a Baltimore man, and his family shared their feelings about the war Friday. WBAL-TV 11 NEWS first broke the news Friday afternoon that a Baltimore man is among a group of Marines killed in a helicopter crash inside Kuwait that happened late Thursday night. He is identified as Marine Staff Sgt. Kendall Waters-Bey, 29, (pictured, right), of northeast Baltimore, WBAL-TV 11 NEWS reported. He is based out of Camp Pendleton in California and leaves behind four younger sisters and a 10-year-old son who lives in Baltimore.
"It's sad that this war is going on and that we have to lose so many people over nothing. I can't bring my brother back, but I really miss him," one of the soldier's sisters said. WBAL-TV 11 NEWS reporter Noel Tucker spoke with the Marine's father who lives in northeast Baltimore where friends and neighbors were seen sobbing in the streets, sharing their grief with the family. The family spoke with WBAL-TV 11 NEWS Friday afternoon and shared their feelings against the war. As he held a picture of his son, Waters-Bey's father, Michael, (pictured, left), said: "I want President Bush to get a good look at this, really good look here. This is the only son I had, only son." He then walked away in tears, with his family behind him. Kenneth, the Marine's only son, was with the family, (pictured, below right). A military spokesperson visited the family Friday morning to confirm that Waters-Bey had died in the crash. But the family had a feeling since Thursday night that he had died in the helicopter, Tucker reported. Waters-Bey's wife saw television footage of the helicopter crash and recognized the identification numbers. The family came to the conclusion that their son, brother and husband was on helicopter. And, before he left, Waters-Bey told his mother that he didn't think he would be coming home after his deployment, Tucker reported. Waters-Bey moved to California with his wife but has been in constant contact with his son and the boy's mother, Tucker reported. Waters-Bey, who played football at Northern High School in Baltimore, was last seen by his son, (pictured, right), a couple of months ago. According to the family, Waters-Bey didn't talk much about the war, but he said it was just something he had to do.
"My brother was the type of person that was loving, caring, and outgoing ... [he was a] joking type of guy, having you laugh ... It's a loss for us," Shernell Waters-Bey, the soldier's sister, said. Baltimore City police officers visited the family to convey the condolences of Mayor Martin O'Malley to the family. The mayor ordered all city flags to be flown at half-staff late Friday evening, Tucker reported. And Gov. Bob Ehrlich issued a statement in response, saying that Waters-Bey's death was "a heroic effort to make the world a safer place." At around 6 p.m., the Marines spoke about the deaths of those who perished in the helicopter crash. "To all those who have lost someone in this conflict, our hearts are with you. We are grateful to your sacrifice and the sacrifice your loved ones have made," Camp Pendleton Maj. Curtis Hill said. The three other Marines who died in the CH-46E helicopter crash were identified as Maj. Jay Thomas Aubin, 36, of Waterville, Maine, Capt. Ryan Anthony Beaupre, 30, of Bloomington, Ill., and Cpl. Brian Matthew Kennedy, 25, of Houston, Texas.
Trim and hyperkinetic at 40, Bonnie Bassler is often mistaken for a graduate student at conferences. Five mornings a week at dawn, she walks a mile to the local YMCA to lead a popular aerobics class. When a representative from the MacArthur Foundation phoned last fall, the caller played coy at first, asking Bassler if she knew anyone who might be worthy of one of the foundation's fellowships, popularly known as genius grants. "I'm sorry," Bassler apologized, "I don't hang out with that caliber of people."
The point of the call, of course, was that Bassler - an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton - is now officially a genius herself. More than a decade ago, she began studying a phenomenon that even fellow biologists considered to be of questionable significance: bacterial communication. Now she finds herself at the forefront of a major shift in mainstream science.
The notion that microbes have anything to say to each other is surprisingly new. For more than a century, bacterial cells were regarded as single-minded opportunists, little more than efficient machines for self-replication. Flourishing in plant and animal tissue, in volcanic vents and polar ice, thriving on gasoline additives and radiation, they were supremely adaptive, but their lives seemed, well, boring. The "sole ambition" of a bacterium, wrote geneticist François Jacob in 1973, is "to produce two bacteria."
New research suggests, however, that microbial life is much richer: highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions. Bassler and other researchers have determined that bacteria communicate using molecules comparable to pheromones. By tapping into this cell-to-cell network, microbes are able to collectively track changes in their environment, conspire with their own species, build mutually beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria, gain advantages over competitors, and communicate with their hosts - the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria.
Last year, Bassler and her colleagues unlocked the structure of a molecular language shared by many of nature's most fearsome particles of mass destruction, including those responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, septicemia, ulcers, Lyme disease, stomach cancer, and bubonic plague. Now even Big Pharma, faced with a soaring number of microbes resistant to existing drugs, is taking notice of her work.
What Bassler and other pioneers in her field have given us, however, is more than a set of potential drug targets. Their discoveries suggest that the ability to create intricate social networks for mutual benefit was not one of the crowning flourishes in the invention of life. It was the first.
The bobtail squid lives in the knee-deep coastal shallows in Hawaii, burying itself in the sand during the day and emerging to hunt after dark. On moonlit nights, the squid's shadow on the sand should make it visible to predators, but it possesses a "light organ" that shines with a blue glow, perfectly matching the amount of light shining down through the water.
The secret of the squid's ability to simulate moonlight is a densely packed community of luminescent bacteria called Vibrio fischeri. Minutes after birth, a squid begins circulating seawater through a hollow chamber in its body. The water contains millions of species of microbes, but cilia in the squid's light organ expel all but the V. fischeri cells. Fed with oxygen and amino acids, they multiply and begin to emit light. Sensors on the squid's upper surface detect the amount of illumination in the night sky, and the squid adjusts an irislike opening in its body until its shadow on the sand disappears. Each morning, the squid flushes out most of its cache of glowing vibrios, leaving enough cells to start the cycle anew.
In the early '60s, Woody Hastings, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois, noticed a curious thing about the V. fischeri grown in his lab. The bacterial population would double every 20 minutes, but the amount of the cells' light-producing enzyme, called luciferase, would stay the same for four or five hours, dispersed among more and more cells. Only when the bacterial population had vastly increased would the flask begin to glow brightly.
From the perspective of a single V. fischeri cell, delaying light production makes sense. The emission of photons is metabolically expensive, as biologists say, and the puny glow of a lone organism is apt to be overlooked in the vastness of the ocean. So how do the cells know when they have reached critical mass? One of Hastings' students, Ken Nealson, theorized that they were secreting a chemical that accumulates in their environment until the group reaches some threshold density. He christened this unknown molecule an "autoinducer." Nealson's hunch turned out to be correct, and the chemical process by which V. fischeri keep track of their own numbers - determining, like a group of senators, that enough members are present to take a vote - was eventually dubbed "quorum sensing."
More recently, scientists have begun to understand that the importance of cell-to-cell communication goes far beyond mere head counting. Many things that bacteria do, it turns out, are orchestrated by cascades of molecular signals. One such behavior is the formation of spores that make bacteria more resistant to antibiotics. Another is the unleashing of virulence. For disease-causing pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus, waiting for a quorum to assemble before getting down to business has distinct benefits. A few microbes dribbling out toxins in a 200-pound host will succeed only in calling down the furies of the immune system. En masse, they can do serious damage. The first "sleeper cells" were bacterial cells.
Hastings, who is now at Harvard, admits that he underestimated the significance of what he saw in his lab. He assumed that quorum sensing was limited to the marine microbes he was studying. "I accepted the view that these bacteria were in a very specific situation," he says, with a burr of regret. "It doesn't take much reflection to think this must occur elsewhere."
The conclusion that only highly evolved organisms have the ability to act collectively proved to be a stubborn prejudice, however. On several occasions, Nealson tried to publish a diagram in microbiology journals illustrating cell-to-cell signaling in V. fischeri, but peer reviewers rejected it. Bacteria just don't do this, the critics told him.
