Growing up “feral” in Alaska gave young Frank von Hippel, PhD, leader of the University of Arizona Health Sciences One Health initiative, a front-seat view to the impacts of climate change.
“I was really lucky to grow up in a place that was very clean,” he said. “We had clean water, clean air and a clean environment. Our farm was an organic farm, so we didn’t use pesticides.”
That “feral” youth? It was the “run free and play in the outdoors” kind of life where the only requirement from his parents was to be home by dinner. This free-roaming mentality continues for von Hippel today. When he’s not teaching as a professor of environmental health sciences at the U of A Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, conducting field research or interviewing experts around the world for his podcast, he can be found out in nature, hiking or enjoying the wilds.
That time in nature can be conducive to idea generation as well as adrenalin inducing. When von Hippel was on the faculty at the University of Alaska Anchorage, he and C. Loren Buck, PhD, a colleague at UAA and now a researcher at Northern Arizona University, went out for a spring mountain bike ride near the campus to casually discuss a proposal they were working on. But spring is also calving season for moose, and that can make the enormous yet fast animals unpredictable and dangerous.
As they were on the trail, the researchers saw a mother and calf up ahead. They stopped, dismounted their bikes and observed the mother. When it appeared she was relaxed, von Hippel and Buck decided it was safe to pass. Just as they thought they were safely beyond the animals, “I was alerted by crashing sounds coming from behind and as I turned to see what was happening, I saw a blur and the flattened ears of the enraged mother moose bearing down on us,” Buck said. Quickly yelling to von Hippel to go faster, they furiously pedaled their bikes away from the onrushing moose.
But before they had a chance to catch their breath from the first charge, the mother moose appeared again.
“It turns out that she knew the forest better than we did and managed to cut the corner to avoid the downhill and intercept us a quarter mile farther on,” Buck said. “This last chase continued for the better part of our pell-mell ride back to campus. We were never certain of whether we were going to be overtaken.”
While no scientific progress was made that day, it was one that would not be forgotten by either. They have closely collaborated on their research ever since.
The One Health philosophy
Growing up in those wide-open spaces led to von Hippel’s interest in the environment and biology.
“I think my childhood is relevant to the work that I do,” he said. “I am an ecotoxicologist. I study pollution and contaminants, and how they impact people, wildlife and the environment. And that is very much One Health because when there’s pollution, it impacts everybody – people and nature. I specifically work with smaller communities, mostly Indigenous communities around the world, mostly in remote places, and underserved communities.”
Alaska was home to many military installations that were abandoned at the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, chemicals such as PCBs and petroleum products were typically buried on site rather than hauled away. With the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, the permafrost that previously held these chemicals is melting, allowing contaminants to leach into the food web.
“We’re working on that problem,” von Hippel said.
In addition to the toxic soup of contaminants from the military installations, the permafrost also can hold viruses and bacteria for a long time.
“Think about influenza pandemics that devastated Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. People who died there were buried in the permafrost so you could have new disease outbreaks if the virus is exposed and infects an animal host,” he said.
Problems brought by climate change, pollution and zoonotic diseases all point to interrelated solutions like One Health. Von Hippel said his research is inherently interdisciplinary and the team typically includes several biologists, as well as a chemist, an anthropologist and others doing community interventions.
Front-row view to climate change
Life on the family farm in Palmer, Alaska – “We were the only Jewish pig farmers in Alaska,” he says with a chuckle – gave von Hippel first-hand experience with a changing climate. When he was younger, the growing season for the farm was short – about three months. But now the season is longer, and agriculture is increasing at higher latitudes in places like Alaska, Canada and Siberia.
While that presents some benefits for society, high latitudes are also faced with many challenges. Retreating sea ice and melting permafrost are leading to coastal erosion and flooding, as well as destabilized infrastructure. The connections of a warming planet, changes to agriculture, impacts on infrastructure and changing dynamics of zoonotic diseases are the kinds of challenges that One Health is all about.
His research and work with the One Health initiative keeps him on the road for long periods of time, but that doesn’t mean he can’t continue to share lessons learned. A lover of languages, von Hippel wrote “The Chemical Age,” a book about how chemists impacted human history, and created “The Science History” podcast, where he has hosted a virtual who’s who of researchers across a variety of topics and from around the world.
He has been on the other side of the podcast mic, as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience, sharing insights on pollution research. Von Hippel’s ability to reach people and share the importance of the One Health philosophy no matter the platform inspires his students and collaborators.
“Frank is a passionate and forward-thinking scientist and leader within the scientific community,” Buck said. “He has a real knack for distilling complicated problems into effective action.”
