Ellen Jo Baron is busy these days: teaching microbiology at Stanford, working for the medical device company Cepheid since 2008 (she is the director of medical affairs), traveling frequently to Cambodia to help improve the country’s diagnostic laboratory capacity, and attending Morgan Car Club events with her husband, Jim Taylor.
Baron grew up in Pennsylvania and South Dakota in the early 1950’s, during the Sputnik era. Because of this, instead of pursuing the art that she loved, she turned to science and ended up majoring in microbiology at Michigan State. Upon graduating in 1968, she began working in a hospital microbiology lab.
“There was an anesthesiologist who controlled the post-appendix surgery care of a young patient,” Baron says in her autobiography, “Many Faces, Many Microbes.” “He kept demanding bacterial cultures of the patient’s respiratory secretions. I knew that what we were recovering were normal mucosal and saliva flora, and that the antibiotic therapy was inappropriate. Nevertheless, the anesthesiologist would not listen to a lowly lab tech…Multiple courses of antibiotics were prescribed to treat ‘the pathogens’ and because of that, he developed an antibiotic-resistant pneumonia and died.”
This experience convinced Baron that she had to be on par with the doctors, and she set out to get another degree. But this was before women’s liberation, and admissions officers in Ph.D. programs in medical microbiology said to her, “As long as there are men with families to support who want to enter our program, we will not allow you to take up precious space.”
Eventually, Baron was accepted to the University of Wisconsin and received her post-doctoral training at UCLA, where she met Taylor through a mutual friend. The couple eventually made their way to Pacific Palisades in the 1980s. “It was such a change from the Midwest,” says Baron. “I was so surprised the way that each district around Los Angeles had a different personality rather than being one big city.”
In 1997, Baron was hired at the joint Stanford-University of California San Francisco laboratory in Palo Alto as director of Clinical Microbiology and Virology (but she still has a home in the Palisades that she and Jim keep as a vacation home).
In the year before that, Baron discovered what she needed to do. She was invited to Nepal to consult and work alongside local clinical microbiology technicians in an American missionary-supported hospital. “This made me realize how much creativity it takes to do science with no money,” says Baron.
Baron began teaching a course on antibiotic resistance testing in various resource-poor countries through the World Health Organization, but by 2002 she was dissatisfied with the lack of success of that program.
While teaching a WHO course in Kuala Lumpur, Baron deduced the problem: in trying to answer some questions about infectious diseases diagnosis, she eventually located the reference books (including one that she had written), but they were covered with dust. She realized how difficult these technical books appeared to someone who did not speak English as a first language. Immediately afterward, while visiting a friend who was volunteering in a hospital in Cambodia, Baron realized that pictures of microbes, and not words, were the key. This led her to create a system of illustrated flow charts that have been used all over the world.
“The reign of Pol Pot was disastrous,” Baron says when discussing Cambodia’s despotic leader in the 1970’s. “He was a tyrant who had absolute power for not that long, but he killed so many people: people who wore glasses, doctors, teachers, those who spoke French, anybody with education was murdered. Turmoil continued for 15 years. The new generation had nobody to look up to and no role models. They are still trying to recover.”
Baron travels to Cambodia several times a year and says, “The three biggest diseases in the developing world are TB, HIV and malaria. There is a lot of funding out there for them. But I work on the other infectious diseases like pneumonia, strep throat and wound infections. That’s where the real work is needed.” Baron founded a non-governmental organization, Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program (www.dmdp.org) to continue her work in Cambodia.
While on a work trip to Africa, Baron made another discovery: hair sheep. For bacteria to grow in cultures on Petri dishes, either sheep or horse blood is needed. But horses are too precious to bleed and traditional sheep do not do well in the tropical climate due to the heat, their wool needing to be sheared and the fact that they are unable to ward off microbes. But when Baron was in Botswana, she noticed that the sheep were covered in hair, not wool, and it seemed that her problem was solved. After a few tests, she found out that they had the appropriate type of blood and were resistant to tropical microbes. Since then, these sheep have been imported into the developing world. Baron hopes to extend hair sheep into all tropical developing countries for use in microbiological media.
Baron, who has worked around the world in more countries than she can remember, hopes to continue visiting Cambodia, while cutting back on some of her high-tech activities.
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