William C Reeves
Authors: Jeanne Lenzer
Journal: BMJ (2004)

William C Reeves was only 25 years old when he and William M Harmon led the research team that isolated the western equine and St Louis encephalitis viruses from the Culex tarsalis mosquito.

Originally trained as an entomologist, Dr Reeves became interested in arboviruses (a term he coined for arthropod borne viruses) before going on to earn his PhD in medical entomology and parasitology in 1943 at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also earned a master's degree in epidemiology in 1949.

In a captivating series of oral history interviews in 1990, Dr Reeves said that he developed an interest in insects while growing up on a ranch in rural California. His interest was so keen that childhood friends called him “Billy Bugs Reeves.”

While working for the Alameda County Mosquito Abatement District during college, Dr Reeves studied treehole mosquitoes (Aedes sierrensis, then named Aedes varipalpus). When the district received complaints about mosquitoes, Dr Reeves would go to the neighbourhood and climb trees looking for mosquitoes in rot holes, where they were known to lay their eggs. If he found mosquitoes, he would plug the hole with sand or concrete.

“It was fun,” said Dr Reeves. “I established a colony, which hadn't been done before. Every day I put my arm in and let them bite me, so I had a couple hundred mosquitoes biting me a day. I was too stupid to put a rabbit or a guinea pig in the cage, so I put my arm in.”

In order to establish a colony of treehole mosquitoes he read everything he could about Aedes mosquitoes, which served as vectors for the yellow fever and dengue fever viruses. Dr Reeves experimented with various methods of hatching the eggs, including adding nutrients to water, but was only partially successful until he had a discussion with a graduate student that “led around to the fact that maybe it was bacteria that were causing the eggs to hatch some way or other,” said Dr Reeves. “So I took some of his cultures of whooping cough... added them to the water, and sure enough, the damn mosquito eggs hatched. I found out if I did this with almost any bacteria, the eggs would hatch.”

Dr Reeves then put the bacteria into a dialysis bag and found that even with the eggs isolated from the bacteria they still hatched—suggesting that the bacteria were affecting the water in some way that led the eggs to hatch. The bacteria created the signal, he discovered, by lowering the oxygen content of the water.​water.




Figure 1





Reeves (on left) created “a roadmap for understanding West Nile virus”

Credit: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY




At the time, other scientists thought perhaps decomposing leaves in the water or some other nutrient was responsible. Dr Reeves set about proving his theory by using a vacuum pump on the water or by bubbling nitrogen through it to remove oxygen and was quite excited to find that the experiments worked.

The same tenacity that paid off in his work with treehole mosquitoes paid off when he and his colleague, Jim Brennan, colonised the Culex tarsalis mosquito—an effort that took 12 years.

While working with Culex tarsalis mosquitoes and their transmission of western equine and St Louis encephalitis viruses, Dr Reeves developed a method for tracking the insects, known as the “sentinel chicken” monitoring system. He found that infected chickens developed antibodies but did not become sick. Since chicken flocks are stationary, it became a useful way to detect the presence of infected mosquitoes in an area.

During the second world war Dr Reeves was a civilian adviser to the US military and helped to investigate an outbreak of Japanese B encephalitis in Okinawa.

He served as the dean of the School of Public Health from 1967 to 1971 and went on to head University of California Berkeley's epidemiology programme from 1971 to 1985.

After 41 years at Berkeley he officially retired in 1987, but when West Nile virus emerged in 1999, he came out of retirement, participating in conference calls with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr Roy Campbell, chief of the surveillance and epidemiology section of the arboviral disease branch at the CDC, said that the research done by Dr Reeves and his colleagues on St Louis encephalitis virus “gave us a roadmap for understanding West Nile virus.”

Dr Reeves, who had a car licence plate that read “CULEX T,” served as chairman of the American Committee on Arthropod-borne Viruses and president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He leaves a wife, Mary Jane, and two sons.

William Carlisle Reeves, medical entomologist, virologist, and epidemiologist University of California at Berkeley, United States (b New York, United States, 1916), d 19 September 2004.