Gail Williams Wertz (PhD ’70) has really had her hands full this spring.

“This happens to be calving season,” she explains in an April call. “I was [just] holding a bottle for a newborn calf that was having a little trouble adjusting to the world.”

She and her husband, L. Andrew Ball, a biochemist, have 425 acres of farmland along the Rappahannock River in Virginia, where they maintain two breeding herds of Black Angus—about 40 to 50 total head of cattle.

Accidentally finding Native American artifacts on the land led Wertz, a trailblazer in RNA virus research, to go back to school in her 70s to pursue an entirely different field: historical archaeology.

Wertz received her PhD in microbiology in 1970 from Pitt Med and went on to a career as a researcher and professor at the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. Her laboratory has advanced scientists’ understanding of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and developed a method for genetically engineering RNA-based viruses—work that is credited as the platform for the Ebola vaccine.

“Gail Wertz made enormous contributions to an understanding of how viruses replicate in cells and trained many students and postdoctoral fellows who proudly carry her legacy forward,” says Terence S. Dermody, an MD, the Vira I. Heinz Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, chair of pediatrics and professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Pitt Med. “Her mentoring extended to junior colleagues as well and helped shape an entire field.”

After she left Pitt, Wertz stayed close to her mentor, the virologist Julius S. Youngner, who died in 2017 and was known for his contributions to the development of the polio vaccine with Jonas Salk, for advances leading to vaccines for equine influenza (with Patricia Dowling) and type A influenza, and for infectious disease and cancer treatments. He was also known for getting things right.

She says of the weekly meetings she had with Youngner, “He’d be supportive of the research and the interpretation, but he had a subtle way of asking questions that let you know that you really could have designed that experiment just a little bit better, really might have gotten a little bit more information. So, it was a wonderful experience in learning, ‘Don’t be satisfied with what you’ve done.’”

Wertz received 38 years of National Institutes of Health funding, including two MERIT awards. Among other honors, she served as president of the American Society for Virology and was a member of the advisory council to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

When her parents were having health issues, Wertz wanted to be closer to them and moved to the farm in 2005.

“Whenever I set out to plant anything, I’d stick a shovel in the ground, start digging in, and in almost no time I would find a Native American artifact,” she says. Some were 5,000 or 10,000 years old, and she wanted to learn about them.

She applied to a graduate program at William & Mary, where she’d attended college, and received her master’s degree in anthropology, specializing in archaeology. To focus her studies, she asked tribal leaders what they wanted to learn from the artifacts she was unearthing. The leaders were particularly interested in where their ancestors had lived, and when and why they’d moved.

Had it not been for the COVID pandemic, Wertz would have pursued another PhD.

She was eager to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 and took the first dose available to her in March 2021. Eight days later she mounted a severe inflammatory response: chills by day, sweats at night and muscle inflammation that left her unable to walk for days. It took months to recover, and she says she still cannot walk with freedom. She and her doctor decided it would be dangerous to take additional doses of the vaccine.

Being an RNA researcher who cannot take an mRNA vaccine is a cruel paradox, yet: “The beauty of archaeology is that it can be done outside and can be distanced,” she says. “And we have the farm. We raise most of our own vegetables. So COVID gave us a reason to legitimately become pioneers, isolated pioneers, without people thinking we’d totally lost it.”

Read more from the Summer 2023 issue.