One of this year's distinguished alumni awardees, Keim was a natural pick for the distinction, not only because of his work with Lark in the 80s but because of his auspicious career in The Pathogen and Microbiome Institute (PMI), an impressive cross-disciplinary research unit at Northern Arizona University where, after graduating from NAU with a BS, he returned to and has been on the faculty for the past 36 years.
PMI is closely associated with TGen North, with whom the institute shares infrastructure to maximize Arizona’s investment in science.
At the U Keim studied everything from soybeans to kangaroo rats. “We did everything," he says about the lab’s variety. “It’s what I call either the Lark curse or the Lark blessing… Gordon was willing to work on any interesting biological problem.” This was before Keim found himself working in infectious diseases, in particular with the deadly bacterium anthrax and later cholera and more recently the SARS-COVID-19 coronavirus, among others. At one highly elevated juncture he would find himself on the world stage as, following the attacks on American soil September 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax spores started showing up in people’s mail. Five individuals eventually died from it.
The "Father of the Dept. of Biology," now the School of Biological Sciences, K. Gordon Lark (1930-2020). The annual Lark Lecture is in his honor. Credit: Ben Okun
How the story played out during the era of the “Anthrax Letters,” the title of a recent Netflix docudrama in which Keim is prominently featured, has all of the intrigue you would expect of a compressed but harrowing era starting in October 2021. It was a time when the country was rattled to the bone and saw terrorists, it seemed, around every corner–and in every letter delivered by the postal service. It was through the use of genomic technology and evolutionary principles at PMI and TGen North that Keim and his team were able to trace the specific, professionally processed spores, used in the attacks to an American microbiologist, vaccinologist, Bruce Ivins, a professional acquaintance of Keim’s and a known expert in the handling of anthrax spores.
Keim was readying to testify in court when Ivins took his life. “Whether or not Bruce Ivins actually did it or not is still hotly debated. But the Justice Department is convinced that he did it and they shut the whole thing down and destroyed all the evidence. So all the evidence that we were analyzing, all the anthrax strains, all the letters,” he says with some disappointment if not bitterness “... it's gone.”
Being pressed into the harsh and sometimes unforgiving media light (and hype) has been a defining feature of Keim’s career, but it has always been unapologetically rooted in the ethic of scientific inquiry that relentlessly follows the facts, honors the data and reaches conclusions that counter sacred paradigms in different scientific fields. His mentor Gordon Lark would be proud.