by 
Immunologist Kent Teague grew up in the Ivory Coast, a country in west Africa. His father worked as a minister and his mother as a musician and librarian. Soon after they moved from Lausanne, Switzerland to the Ivory Coast with their three-year-old son, Kent developed malaria. The disease nearly killed him. His father wrapped him in a blanket and drove him more than six hours to Abidjan (the capital city at that time). “There were so many people around us dying of all kinds of infections. Here [in the United States] you see mostly cancers and chronic problems. Over there, malaria is the big one that kills many kids and other people.”
Kent survived but saw his mother’s sadness when other children died. Then his little brother “came up with big-time fevers and the malaria medicine wasn’t working. This traumatized us. I remember asking my mother when I was maybe six years old and Tim was four and she was praying for him, ‘Mama, is Timmy going to die?’ And she looked at me and said ‘I just don’t know.’”
They drove Kent’s brother to Abidjan, where the doctor said “This kid’s not going to make it.” The U.S. embassy’s doctor wouldn’t see them because they weren’t embassy personnel. But a friend of Kent’s father “loaded us up in his truck and we drove eight hours to the north of the country, to a missionary hospital.” A doctor there “asked about the house” where the Teagues lived and whether there were rats and other rodents there. “He said he’d guess that it was typhus” that Tim had, not malaria, and treated him with an antibiotic that “cured little Timmy, who went on to become a high school French teacher, a minister, and dean at a college in Missouri.”
These experiences inspired Teague to do what he could to help people fight illness. “I have vivid memories of the desperation of the people” of the Ivory Coast “and what those diseases did to the body. I was interested in medical science but chose to be a medical scientist instead of a physician.”
Teague works in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. He studies the ways the immune system responds to stress. Physical forms of stress affect human beings. One might ask how the concussions football players sometimes get affect their brains, for instance. Teague and his colleagues found a connection between those concussions and the size of the hippocampus, a part of our brain involved in long-term memory.
Psychosocial forms of stress can also affect our health. How do difficult things that happen to kids in the first five years of their lives, as their immune systems are developing, affect them? Does the stress of having a parent in trouble or seeing or experiencing abuse affect a child’s immune system? How long do those effects last? Teague uses the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) assessment to identify this kind of stress in children’s lives. Having a parent in prison or a parent addicted to alcohol or drugs raises a child’s ACE score. This number helps biologists compare different kids with similar experiences. Teague looks at the ways the bodies of those children respond to infections.
How do Teague and the other scientists working with him measure stress? One way is with … spit. They ask people to do something stressful, perhaps even asking them to solve a difficult math problem. Then those math-stressed people spit into a tube. Researchers check the levels of cortisol in their saliva, measuring it in nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml).
Cortisol levels are higher when we first wake up than they are at other times of day. Measuring those levels at different times of day and on different days of the week gives Teague a sense of how stressful each day was for patients in his studies. Children living in stressful homes might show the most stress after a weekend, while other children might have higher cortisol levels during the school week. Psychologists talk with the kids and their parents and biologists look at the graphs they make of the children’s stress levels and see whether that correlates with what the psychologists learned about their home lives.
Teague uses machines called flow cytometers, whose lasers help him see the difference between leukemia cells and normal ones. They also help him locate different kinds of white blood cells (WBCs), which fight diseases like HIV. Cells go through a tube and pass by the flow cytometer’s lasers. Antibodies made in the lab attach themselves to a protein only certain cells, for instance T cells (one type of WBC), have on their surface. A flourochrome on the antibodies makes the laser glow green (for T cells) or red (for B cells, another kind of WBC). As the different cells pass the laser, they reflect different colors of light and the cytometer reports how many of each kind of cell a blood sample contains. It can also separate certain cells from the others, helping Teague produce a test tube of only T cells. He investigates which genes are activated (turned on) and which are turned off in those cells. “That’s really propelled the field in the last couple of decades, allowing us to understand what those cells do.”
He also looks at how WBCs develop. “They all come from the bone marrow.” How does “that one stem cell type evolve into all the different stem cells? We take bone marrow and put different colors on [the cells] and then we can pull out all the different stem cell types, put them back in a dish and see what they become.” “I’m interested in the ones that will become T cells. They go through 22 steps or so. Eventually, we’ll have every step figured out, from the time they’re immature, not yet fully developed, T cells until they’re in your blood, attacking infected cells to prevent infections from spreading. They also react against tumor cells but their main job is to keep infections down.” People with AIDS lose some of their T cells. By studying the development of those cells and by examining what different types of stress does to their development, Teague and his colleagues hope to help identify ways of treating AIDS and other diseases.
Thinking of students learning math today, Teague points out that “You don’t have to be a math guru or even that great at it to still enjoy doing it and in science, you’re going to use it. I hope people don’t get discouraged and think they can’t go into science if they’re not” the top students in their math classes. But learn as much math as you can: “It’s part of what can make science fun.” “In biology, there’s a lot of guess work and every answer’s different.” Math and numbers like a child’s ACE score are some of the more reliable parts of the work scientists like Teague do. Without math, “it’s very hard for us to ever get anywhere.”
Looking back on his journey from being a malaria patient as a child in the Ivory Coast to his work as an immunolgoist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Teague says “This has been a fascinating ride so far. I don’t regret it for a second.”
