Yuan Chang and Patrick Moore: teaming up to hunt down cancer-causing viruses.

Y uan Chang was an undergraduate student in biology at Stanford University when a friend mentioned a teaching assistant whom she might want to meet. His name was Patrick Moore, and he was a doctoral candidate in biophysical chemistry, also at Stanford. Ironically, Moore had also been tipped off about Chang, but as fate would have it, the pair didn't actually connect until they were both in medical school at the University of Utah. They married in 1989, 7 years later. Ever since, Chang and Moore have sustained not just a marriage but also an increasingly celebrated research collaboration in tumor virology. The pair achieved global acclaim when they identifi ed human herpesvirus 8, the cause of Kaposi sarcoma, which is the most common malignancy in AIDS patients. The fi nding excited cancer researchers because it con-fi rmed that tumors found predominantly in immunocompromised patients could be virally induced. That was in 1994. Now, Chang and Moore have succeeded once again, revealing what appears to be the viral trigger for Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare and aggressive skin cancer that affl icts 1,500 Americans annually. The newly discovered agent is a member of the polyomavirus family, which includes several varieties that produce tumors in animals. Dubbed Merkel cell polyomavirus, this is the fi rst variety linked to human cancer. Chang and Moore, who acknowledge the need for replication of this fi nding, reported their discovery online in Science on January 17, 2008. illnesses, often in the developing world. " He was always going off to Africa when it came to setting a date for the wedding, " Chang said with a chuckle. In fact, both often went to different places as their careers evolved. After medical school, Moore went to Montreal for his internship, hoping to learn more French, a language common to many African countries. But he ultimately did most of his rotations at Jewish General Hospital and, Chang noted, picked up some choice Yiddish phrases instead. After completing the internship, Moore went even farther east to Atlanta to train with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their epidemic surveillance program. Chang, meanwhile, went in the opposite direction for a residency in anatomic pathology at the University of California, San Francisco. " We fi nally got married in 1989 after completing these training programs and lived in a small, idyllic cliffside apartment in Pacifi ca, Calif., …