ROBERT KRULWICH: For a whole lot of reasonsómeteorological, political, engineering reasonsóHurricane
Katrina was a major, major science story last year.
But now, we're going to add one more reason. We're going to tell you a Katrina story about
a young man who got very sick, but he had one bit of luck. He had a very unusual friend,
Dr. Tyler Curiel. Hold on a second, he's a hard man to keep up with. He runs 100 mile
marathons. This is a man who's on his very own path; he goes where he wants to go.
Now he's the Chief of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Tulane University where he runs
a lab that specializes in immune cells.
TYLER CURIEL (Tulane University School of Medicine): We look at the human immune response
ROBERT KRULWICH: But Tyler had never seen anything or anyone like Andy Martin. In 2000,
Andy Martin, from California, was just about to start medical school at Tulane.
ANDY MARTIN : A week before I started my first year, it showed up. I was on a vacation, like
a last hurrah vacation, and I started getting nosebleeds.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Andy was diagnosed with a very rare and very deadly cancer, called S.N.U.C.
TYLER CURIEL: S.N.U.C. is Sino Nasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma. Andy decided that he wanted to
do research on his own cancer. He persuaded me to allow us to biopsy his tumor.
AVRIL JENSEN (Andy Martin's sister): "If this cancer's going to get me, damn it, I'm going
to go down fighting, you know, and make a difference, so that future people who are
diagnosed with this don't have the same outcome that I had."
ROBERT KRULWICH: The student and his mentor worked side by side to try to find a treatment,
even though both of them knew that Andy didn't have much time.
AVRIL JENSEN: Tyler and him had a really good friendship, as well as, you know, this amazing
RUTH BERGGREN (Tyler Curiel's wife): Andy came over to our house for dinner many times.
He enjoyed wine-tasting; particularly he was fond of ports.
ROBERT KRULWICH: When Andy was about to undergo chemotherapy and lose his taste, Tyler, a
bit of a connoisseur, threw a wine-tasting party. And Andy's classmates shaved their
heads in solidarity. Andy is the bald guy in the middle.
And the doctor raised money for his student's research by breaking a world's record: he
dribbled a basketball for 24 hours, while running a total of 108 miles.
ROBERT KRULWICH: They generated a living cell line from Andy's tumor, the only known cell
line of S.N.U.C. in the world. And those cells outlived Andy. Already very sick, Andy Martin
left home to visit friends at Tulane when he was overcome by cancer, in November, 2004.
AVRIL JENSEN: When it came to that week, Tyler kind of took over as his personal physician.
And he was there every day at least one time, sometimes more. He, he passed away on a Friday
ROBERT KRULWICH: And when Hurricane Katrina struck at the heart of New Orleans, Tulane
University was right in its path. People, homes and property were in serious danger
and so was a lot of science. Tyler decided to stay in his lab through the storm.
He was joined by his colleague and his neighbor at the lab, Mike Brumlik. Together, they were
determined to protect the millions of dollars of equipment there, and the research and Andy
MIKE BRUMLIK (Tulane University School of Medicine): These cells were very important.
There was...this was personal.
TYLER CURIEL: ...number one thing I knew we had to save was we had to get the Andy Martin
ROBERT KRULWICH: Their plan was simple. Keep all of the samples dry and cold enough to
survive just a brief loss of power. They spent the whole weekend hard at work.
TYLER CURIEL: We had consolidated all of our things into three or four freezers.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Monday morning, the storm brought winds stronger than 150 miles an hour.
TYLER CURIEL: It was like The Wizard of Oz. We'd look out the window and gigantic pieces
of buildings would just go blowing by.
ROBERT KRULWICH: By the time the storm ended, their building was running on an emergency
generator, but the samples were fine. Tyler went to the phone to tell friends everything
TYLER CURIEL: Mike Brumlik walked into my officeówe're in Tulane Medical School, in
my officeóand he said, "You might want to look out the window."
MIKE BRUMLIK: And he does this. And, uh, of course, his jaw drops, because he realizes
what...more or less what I realized, which is that we're in very deep trouble.
TYLER CURIEL: I looked out the window and saw that we were flooded. I had no idea. As
far as our research goes, this is the worst-case scenario. It doesn't get any worse.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Suddenly, it's a race against time. The men try to move a 400-pound freezer
down six stories, and across this pedway, to the building next door which has better
It takes them all day to move the samples. And when they finally make it to the other
building, the generator there is almost under water.
MIKE BRUMLIK: The generator is not in a safe place. Six more inches of water rising and
the generator is toast, so we are effectively doomed at this point.
TYLER CURIEL: You don't want to be melodramatic, but I was thinking, this is my whole life's
MIKE BRUMLIK: And the power fails at about 5 p.m. on Tuesday. And that's it. The only
place to save anything cold is the liquid nitrogen tanks.
ROBERT KRULWICH: The problem is liquid nitrogen will evaporate, which means the samples have
maybe 10 days, and then they'll melt.
TYLER CURIEL: And you're looking around, the city's flooded, you're thinking, it's going
to be months before we can come back in. We had no idea.
ROBERT KRULWICH: The next morning, after Tyler and Mike had packed everything they could
into the liquid nitrogen, they get another surprise; this one comes in uniform.
TYLER CURIEL: You've got two minutes to get out and evacuate or you're going in handcuffs.
It was...bang...and then, they've got big rifles on their back. And you don't argue
with people like this. I couldn't find my shoes. And I kept telling them, I'm just looking
for my shoes. And they said, "Buddy, you're going in the cuffs." We left our food behind,
we left our water behind, and we were off.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Tyler was headed to Charity Hospital, where there were still hundreds
TYLER CURIEL: I had been there a few times and saw how desperate conditions were. Mike
said, "If you're going to Charity, I'm going to Charity."
MIKE BRUMLIK: I had done everything I could do to protect the science. And now it was
ROBERT KRULWICH: Tyler and Mike hopped into a canoe they had been keeping handy.
TYLER CURIEL: ...shove off and we'd paddle right out through that exit right there.
ROBERT KRULWICH: And then they paddled a couple of blocks down to Charity, where Tyler's wife,
Ruth Berggren, was one of the doctors in charge.
RUTH BERGGREN: He said, "What can I do for you?" And I thought about it, and I said,
"Honestly, I need you to go fetch water." So here's my brilliant husband, the scientist,
the immunologist. He actually said to me, he said, "I'm a perfect person for this job."
ROBERT KRULWICH: By now, these guys had seen just about everything.
TYLER CURIEL: We had already been flooded in for four or five days. Food was low, water
was low; we had been without electricity for a number of days. It was very hot. Conditions
ROBERT KRULWICH: They had successfully evacuated the patients at Charity Hospital.
TYLER CURIEL: So I realized, you know, time's up. You have to go.
ROBERT KRULWICH: But remember, the clock was ticking. It had been three days since Tyler
put his lab samples into the liquid nitrogen. He had a week, maybe less, to keep them from
melting, including the cells of Andy Martin.
AVRIL JENSEN: It was scary. It was a very scary time. And my mom even said it's like
ROBERT KRULWICH: From Dallas, Tyler worked the phones for almost a week. He got a jet,
coolers. And now he and Mike raced back to New Orleans.
MIKE BRUMLIK: Now the lab smells bad because we have freezer stuff and fridge stuff that's
perished, so it doesn't smell pretty. But preying on our mind is, "Did the nitrogen
TYLER CURIEL: And we had the three liquid nitrogen containers lined up, one, two, three.
I turned to Mike. I said, "Mike, I'm going to lift the lid, and if it's warm in there
and the samples are thawed, game's over." And he said, "Do it."
MIKE BRUMLIK: Together we lift the lid and this plume of, of, of vapor hits us in the
face.
TYLER CURIEL: It was really cold. It was really white. That's what it's supposed to look like.
ROBERT KRULWICH: By chance, out of all the samples inside all three freezers, the first
box that Tyler pulled out contained Andy Martin's cells, frozen, safe and sound.
AVRIL JENSEN: I was calling everybody. Oh, they made it out!
TYLER CURIEL: So we were high-fiving and just going, "Yeah!"
AVRIL JENSEN: One of the port wines that Andy liked, he actually had a bottle, and it's
still at my parents' house. And Tyler had made some crack about celebrating, and I said,
"Well, I have one of Andy's bottles of Fonseco, you know? I can ship it to you, wherever you
want." He said, "No, I'd like if you would save that, and we can all celebrate together
when we see each other again."
ROBERT KRULWICH: Andy's cells were saved, but Tyler lost a lot of research. And he's
TYLER CURIEL: My sense is that we've lost millions of dollars worth of research, thousands
of man-hours of research. And then you multiply that times hundreds of investigators. And
ROBERT KRULWICH: But Tyler knows how to stay on his feet.
TYLER CURIEL (Turning car ignition on): How about that?
ROBERT KRULWICH: His home wasn't too damaged. And he had to shift his lab work to different
cities for a while. But New Orleans is calling, and it won't be long before Tyler's whole