Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV Encore Booknotes 20121020

We are tired about railing in raising the government. We will always do it. That is a valid response and i cant help myself from raising it in the air but the fact of the matter is we want to live free and we want to know how to grow tomatoes in liberty and like our neighbors and be valuable members of the community. To some degree id rather be a Good Neighbor than a good libertarian and i know there is a conflict there but if i had to choose i would choose the Good Neighbor. Wendy mcelroy is the author of the art of being free. You are watching booktv. Some booktv, encore booknotes, gina kolata sat down in 2000 to discuss her book about the devastating flu outbreak of 1918 that killed 40 Million People worldwide. The author use letters, interviews and news reports to compile data for the book. Its about an hour. Cspan gina kolata, author of flu the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it. Other than being one of the longest titles weve had, whyd you write this . Guest i got ini never really thought much about the flu. It just seemed like something that came around every year, and people would just get sick and then theyd get better again. And id never really been interested in it at all. But then a few years agoimim a reporter for the New York Times, and i wrote an article for the times about a really miraculous discovery. There is a guy at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and he was reporting in ain a technical journal called Science Magazine that he had somehow managed to get some lung tissue from a soldier who had died in 1918. And in that lung tissue, there was still fragments of the virus that had killed him. And when i interviewed this man, dr. Taubenberger, about his work, he told me about the influenza pandemic of 1918 and i was stunned. I just had never seenid never heard of anything like this. It was the worst Infectious Disease epidemic in recorded history. It killed so many people that if Something Like that came by today, it would kill more people than the top10 killers wrapped together1. 5 million americans or something, if something of thatwith that morality rate came by today. And i just found out by looking at the cdcsome papers by the centers for Disease Control that 99 percent of the people that died in this epidemic were under age 65, so it wasit was an astonishing, devastating epidemic. And what made it a story for me was this idea that all these years later, almost a century later, molecular biology had advanced to such a state, and there is just incredible serendipity involved, that somebody could actually have some lung tissue that still had those viral genes in there and ask the question what was this virus . How could an influenza virus become such a killer . And could it happen again . And if so, would you recognize it in time . Cspan theres one reference in the book that maybe as many as 20 million to 100 Million People died worldwide in 1918 from this flu . Guest yes. Historians keepkeep making theracheting the number upward. People now think that 40 million is an underestimate, which used to be sort of the median estimate. And i heard that most recently, there was a meeting of historians and people who were interested in this flu in south africa, and theyre saying that they think that the true number worldwide was closer to 100 million and that possibly 20 million died on the indian subcontinent alone. Cspan what is influenza . Guest its a simple little virus. Its just got eight genes and it only lives inin human lungs. And while its there, its only job is to take a lung cell and make it into a virus factory. So the virus gets in, just like every other virus, it turtakes a cells machinery andand forces it to just make new viruses. And then the cell dies and the viruses escape and they infect a new cell. Its a simple little thing. Cspan what happens to the body then . Guest what happens isthere are four hallmarks of influenza, iive heard. One of them is that youyou get a fever and you take to your bed and you have muscle aches and pains. Lets see, theres four of them. Muscle aches and pains, fever, you coyou have a cough. You dont always hayou dont always sneeze, but you have a cough. Cspan have you ever had it, by the way . You sound like you havent. Guest i think i had it once. Cspan so you dont know what it feels like . Guest i did. When i had it, i said, so this is the flu. it was so bad. It was five days of torture. I still remember those muscle aches. They were the worstand the high fever. Cspan now back in 1918, where did it start . Guest thats a really good question. The first time it came into the United States in a big way, it showed up at a place called camp devens, which is near boston. And people thought, at the time, that this might be germ warfare because they couldnt believe it was Something Like the flu. Many people insisted on putting the word influenza in quotation marks. It was during world war i, and there were these rumors that there had been this greasy cloud floating over Boston Harbor with these germs in it that were killing people, or that maybe the germans had put something into bayer aspirin that would kill people. But when it arrived at camp devens, it was the most horrible thing that anybody had ever witnessed. They hadso many young soldiers were dying that they had to have special trains to take away the dead. The bodies were stacked up like cord wood, as people said when they were there. And it wasit gotit was so shocking that thethat the Surgeon General sent a contingent of three of the leading doctors in the United States to go out and say, what is going on at camp devens . one of them later wrote his memoirs, and he said, i cant even bear to think about this thing. this was camp devens in the fall of 1918, when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated the inferiority of human inventions in the taking of human life. He said that hethat these are memories burned on his brain that he would like to remove, if he possibly could. And when they described what happened when theywhen these doctors wanted to see an autopsy, they said theythat there were so many dead in camp devens that they had to step over the bodies just to get into the autopsy room, the bodies of the dead that hadnt been removed yet. And then when theywhen they watched an autopsy take place, the military doctor opened the chest of a young man who had died and there were his lungs, sodden and heavy in his body, filled with fluid, totally useless. The man had essentially died because his lungs had filled with fluid. And a doctor there, who had been pretty much imperturbable, nothing could shake him, turned and said, this must be somethingthis must be a plague. he could not believe it. Cspan in your book, you have theseyou have thesewell, you explain what they are in thethe bottom picture there. Guest the bottom picture . These are the samthese are some of the samples of lung tissue from people of 19nine1918. You might think, well, what was this virus . And howd we ever know . and what was really miraculous was there is a military warehousepeople have described it as Something Like the library of congress of the deadstarted by Abraham Lincoln. Every time that a military doctor does an autopsy, hes supposed to put thesome of the tithe tissue and the persons medical records in this big warehouse. There werewere people who died of that flu in 1918, and at the time, doctors took little snippets of the lung tissue, soaked them in formaldehyde, wrapped them in paraffin and sent them to the warehouse. And dr. TaubenbergerJeffrey Taubenberger at walter reed, finally, at the end of this century, put in a requisition for some people who had died of that flu and asking if he could find some lung tissue that had some viral genes in it. And those picthat picture you just saw is of the little pieces of paraffin wax with the lung tissue in it. And inside that lung tissue, after all these years, there is still that flu virus from 1918. Cspan now go back to this Pathology Institute out here at walter reed. Have you been there . Guest yes, i have. Cspan have youthere are three millionwhat . Samples . Physical. Guest yeah, there aretheyre in boxes and jars and things. Andand theyreits this big sort of corrugated metal warehouse withand eveand with cement floors. I guess its to protect it from burning down, or maybe because its more cheap to make that way. And they have these big racks of box after box after box. And theres a man there named al riddick, and his job is towhen somebody says, i think id like to get some lung samples from awell, what was asked for in this case, was people who died of influenza in 1918 and who died very, very quickly because they didnt want the person to have gotten the flu virus and then lingered and, meanwhile, the virus that was left in their lungs had died. And he coand so theres actuallythe records since 1917 have been computerized, so he can get a computer printout of where to look. He goes over with his ladders and his hook and he takes down these boxes and in them are samples. I mean, theres cancer tumors, theres brain tissue, theres all sorts of stuff in that warehouse. And this was lung tissue. Cspan you said that Abraham Lincoln started it. Guest right. Cspan is thereis therethere are samples from back during the civil war also there . Guest from right after the civil war, yes. From then on, theyve been just steadily accumulating them just sort of like a pack rats paradise. And it wasit was a brilliant idea because when they started this, who would ever know what you would use it for . And the idea that in 19in 1918, no one had ever found a human influenza virus, so the idea that somebody some day could come back and make some use of this material was just brilliant. Cspan didi mean, and i know im jumping way ahead. Guest ok. Cspan do they know what caused the influenza of 1918 . Guest they know it was a flu virus. They havetheres only eight genes in a flu virus. At this point, they have three lung samples from people who died in 1918 who have those genes in them. Put itgetting them out is pushing the limits of molecular biology and theytakes a long time. They describe it as putlike putting together a mosaic, a very detailed mosaic, piece by piece, to put those genes together. Theyve gotten three of the eight genes completely put together now. They chose some of thetheyre choosing them in the order of their likelihood that they think theyre going to get anan easy answer to what camade that virus so deadly. Unfortunately, the first three genes have told them that its a flu virus. That its related to bird viruses and pig viruses, but they have not provided the answer yet to why it was dangerous. Cspan let me just ask you a couple of questions about this Pathology Institute. Theres only one person that works there . Guest one person that i saw, but im sure theres others. Cspan didid you get any sense that theres a lot of interest or traffic there . Guest no, no. I was the only person there. Cspan how big a facility is it . Guest it wasit was pretty big. It was this huge, like warehouse thing. Cspan right out here at walter reed hospital. Guest yeah. Well, right near it. Cspan right near it. Guest a few miles away in maryland, just over the border. Cspan one of the things, i must admit, when i picked this book up i didnt expect to get out of this book was kind of a drama. I mean, there is some personal stories in here that are sare fairly dramatic. Didwere you surprised atabout the competition going on to find thisthe cause of it . Guest well, by the time i started to write the book, i knew, sort of, that there was a story. And i write books for myself. I lii read fiction for fun. And i like ai wouldnt write a book unless i thought there was a story, because if you just have chapter after chapter, like a textbook, for me, its not something i would pick up and read just because i wanted to read it. So thats what appealed to me, was that there wasthere was athere was a drama there. There was competition. It showed all thethe strengths and weaknesses of the search for Scientific Data and evidence. Cspan whatwhat book is this for you . Guest this is, like, mywell, it depends on whether you count noncommercial or commercial books. I guess commercial, fourth. Cspan and how long have you worked for the New York Times . Guest twelve years. Cspan where were you right before that . Guest Science Magazine here in washington, where Jeffrey Taubenberger published his first paper. Cspan how did you get to science . Guest oh, you dont even want to know, its so silly. I wasi wanted to be a writer, i really did, but i was studying science. And at this time, i was just sort of droppingyou know, sort of changing graduate schools. I was in mai was studying mathematics, getting a mai was going to be aget a phd and decided to get a masters instead. So i just applied to every place in the washington area, because i was married then and i just couldnt move around so easily, and tried to get a writing job. Science gave me a job that was not as a writer. It was as areally boring job, selecting reviewers for manuscripts. And i said, ill take this job, but you have to understand that iimim doing it to sort of worm my way into the writing department. so i took the job. And then shortly after i took it, i said, now id like to write an article for you on my own time, for free. Take it or leave it. Just, you know, do you mind if i do it . and they said, ok, and they published it. And then i did another and another and another, and thats how i did it. Cspan wheres your hometown, originally . Guest originally . Baltimore. Cspan and whered you go to school, college . Guest university of maryland. And then i spent a year and a half in a graduate program at mit in molecular biology before i decided that that was not for me, either. So i tried science. Cspan andand Science Magazine is bought by what kind of person . Guest its actually really mostly a subscription magazine and its scientists and policymakers who usually read it. But they have a new section thats written forits supposed to be written for anybody to read. Itsit can get kind of technical, but the idea is to write something so that a physicist who wants to know what theyre doing in molecular biology doesnt have to know any of the stuff that led up to this discovery. Its just like writing aa normal news story. All they have to do is just read it and theyll understand whats exciting. Cspan who owns it . Guest its owned by the American Association for the advancement of science, a nonprofit group. Cspan and you mention another magazine that these kind of things are published in is nature . Guest nature. Its, like, sciences big competitor. Its a british magazinevery similar, has a news section, written by science. It has mostly scientific articles. Cspan go back to 1918 again. Hwhat waswas this aa more devastating flu than the average one that we hear about all the time, even today . Guest theres no comparison. When you think about just the number of deadnow as ii think i said a little bit earlier, 1. 5 million americans would die if Something Like this came by . Toin a typical flu season, 20,000 die. And most of them are very old or have some other sort of chronic medical condition that really weakens them. Here 99 percent of them were under age 65. It was a very peculiar death curve. It was shaped like a w. The youngvery young died and then people between the ages of 20 and 40 died in huge numbers. Thats the middle of the w. And then at the end, some of the old people died. Cspan you have ai would like to ask you to read it on page 25, if you dont mind. Guest sure. Cspan thomas wolfe, the authors brother, i guess, died of this. Guest yeah. Cspan andand then thomas wolfewhere did he write this, thats in your book . Guest he was writing look homeward, angel, and ithats fiction, but i asked a number of people and they said its a description of his brothers death, was actually his brothers real name and it was a description that was not fictionalized. It was really what happened when his brother died of the flu. Cspan would you mind reading this in here andand tell us what youwhy you put this in the book . Guest ok. Should i tell you why first . Cspan yeah. Guest ok. I think that when i talk about the flu, or when people who areare living today talk about the flu, its almost impossible for us to imaimagine what it was like. I tried as much as i could to put the words in of people who had been there, because when youve been there and seen it, it has a sort of aof aan emotion that we canti cant capture and i dont think anybody else that ive spoken to has been able to capture. So the reason i put the thomas wolfe description in was of all the descriptions i had read about people dying of the flu, this one just really touched me. It wasitit almost brought me to tears. It was the saddest thing. And you can imagine yourself in that room watching somebody die like this. And it wasit was one of thosethose moments that, you knowii mean, ii cant forget this passage, and thats why i put it in. Wolfe came home to a death watch. His brother was lying in a sick room upstairs while his family waited for what they feared was inevitable. Wolfe went upstairs to the grayshto the grayshaded light of the room where ben lay alwhere ben layim sorryand he saw, in that moment a searing recognition, that his beloved 26yearold brother was dying. Now heres the quote of how he died. Bens long, thin body lay threequarters covered by the bedding. Its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him. It was somehow distorted and detached, as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal, and the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray. Out of this ground a tint of death lit by two red flags of fever. The stiff, black furs of a threeday beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible. It recalled the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. And bens thin lips were lifted in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation above his white, somehowdeadlooking teeth, and inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs. And the sound of this gaspingloud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it, gave to the scene its final note of horror. The next day ben drlewdrewgrew delirious. By 4 00, it was apparent that death was near wolfe road. Ben had brief periods of consciousness, unconsciousness and delirium, though most of the time he was delirious. His breathing was easier. He hummed snatches of popular songs, some old and forgotten, called up now from the lost and secret attics of his childhood. But always he returned, in his quiet humming, to a popular song of wartime,. unintelligible sentimental, but now rapidlybut now tragically moving, just a babys prayer at twilight. And then ben sank into unconsciousness. His eyes were almost closed, their gray flicker was dulled, coated with a sheen of insensibility and death. He lay quietly upon his back, very straight, without sign of pain, and with a curious upturned thrust of his sharp, thin face. His mousemouth was firmly shut. Wolfe stayed with ben that night fervently praying, even though he thought he could not believe in god or prayer. whoever you are, be good to ben tonight. Show him the way. Whoever you are, be good to ben tonight. Show him the way. he lost count of the minutes, the hours. He heard only the feeble rattle of dying breath in his wild synchronic prayer. Wolfe fell asleep, then woke suddenly, calling his family with a certain knowledge that the end with neigh, then quieted, lay still. The body appeared to grow rigid before them. Then in a last gasp, breath drewben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration. His gray eyes opened. Filled with a terrible vision of all life in onethe one moment, he seemed to rise forward bodily from his pillows without support a flame, a light, a glory. and so, wolfe wrote, ben passed instantly, scornfully and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death. Cspan does he say in the book what his brother did . Guest i dont know. Cspan andand you say, i think, another statistic that Something Like 25 percent, 28 percent of the American People got flu that year. Guest thats right. Its kind of an amazing statistic, because usually only a very small percentage of people actually get the flu. Everybody says they have it. They usually have some other disease. So this was an amazingly infectious flu. It just spread throughout the popit spreadit spread so quickly throughout the population that people couldnt even understand how it was moving so fast. And then it was 25 times more deadly than normal flus and seemed to be killing the young people, which is why they had such an amazing death rate from that flu. Cspan heres a photograph from 1976 of president ford and his doctor giving him a shot. Whats the story behind this . Guest in 1976, scientists were really afraid the 1918 flu was coming back again. They hadthey thought that the 1918 flu was related to a flu that also inflinfected pigs at that time, because around the same time as people were dying of the 1918 flu, pigs, in huge numbers, got influenza and started to die. Its not clear if people gave it to pigs or pigs gave it to people, but itbut scientists became convinced that the 1918 flu was related to a swine flu. In 1976, a young 18yearold soldier at ft. Dix went out on a march with his unit. He was feeling sick with the flu, but he really wanted to join them. It was a nighttime fivemile hike. He collapsed and was brought back to the hospital and died. He had a swine flu, they finally discovered. And this was really strange. A young and healthy guy getting flua swine flu and dying. It was the very end of the flu season. It takes six months to make enough vaccine to protect the population. And so president ford asked the most eminent doctors in the country and flu experts, what should we do . do you say, well, lets wait until next season and see if theres a problem . or do you say, this one death is scary enough that we ought to really try to protect everybody and getmake a swine flu vaccine and give it out to the entire nation . the decision was, i think, understandable. They said, we cant take a chance, because if we guess wrong and the 1918 flu is back again, people are going to be dying rapidly. Well have no way of protecting them. and so there was a decision to make anan Unprecedented Campaign to immunize all americans against swine flu. It turned out that it was kind of a campaign that didnt work too well. And president ford, in order to try to encourage people to get the vacthe vaccine, was photographed getting his own flu shot. Cspan a hundred and thirtyfive Million Dollars back then. Guest right. Cspan . And it didnt turn out that it was that important. Guest it turned out that there was no swine flu epidemic. Therethis guy got swine flu. No one knows where he got it from. He didnt haveit was totally unclear how he got it. A few other people seemed to have antibodies to a swine flu, indicating they might have gotten one and recovered, but nobody died, except for him. There were notnobody was getting sick from this flu and so they had a vaccine against a flu strain that was not causing any sort of problem. And around the same time thisas everybody started getting immunized, people started saying, the vaccine is actually killing people. Its making them sick. and so this wasthere was a lot of fear of this vaccine. And i think thats haunted people to this day. Because today, you still hear people say, oh, flu vaccines, they never get the right flu strain. And the vaccine is worse than the disease. And the vaccine can make you sick. and i think a lot of that got started after 1976. Cspan were in the flu season, as we record this, going through february andhow do they knowwho determines, first of all, what shot you get . You know, a couple months ago when people were. Guest yeah. Yeah. Cspan . Offered shots. Guest theres a group of experts that aretheres a surveilan International Surveillance that goes on all the time. And what they look at is, they say, whats the flu strain thats starting to become the predominant one at the end of theend of the Previous Year . and then, what flu strains are appearing elsewhere in the world . because what happens is, the fluwhat the flu does is every year it comes through a population and it kind of burns itself out. The 1918 one did that, too. And it infects everybody who could be infected and then itsor whoswhos been exposed to it, and then it mutates. It just changes itself a little bit and then it comes back again andand peand if itsif people are vulnerable to it, it will infect them. Cspan you say that guangdong province, right above hong kong in Southern China, hahavethat itthat all flus emanate there . Guest well, theres some people who say that allevery major epidemic, every pandemic thats swept around the world in this century hashas begun in Southern China. And theres a reason why theythey sthey think this is sort of the hot spot for flus. And that is that fluin order to really, really sweep the world, you have to get a flu thats so different from anything youve seen that virtually everybody in the world is susceptible to it. And one way of doing that is to get a flu thata flu that its genes have not beenor have not been seen by human beings really before. And birds gets infected with flu all the time. They dont even get sick. It lives in their intestines. And bird flus are generally really different than ones that infect people. And pigs can be infected with both bird flus and human flus, and they can sort of a mixing bowl and come out with a new flu that has bird characteristics andand human characteristics and can infect people. Cspan by the way, how come pigs and not cows . Guest i dont know. Cant answer that. Cspan but its only pigs. I mean, only theother than the. Guest well, no, its not only pigs, but pigs are aare aare a verii cant tell you that its only pigs. I wish i could. I think itsi dont know. Cspan but even if itif it is a heavya pig thing. Guest yeah. Cspan . Do you kill the virus when you cook the pig . Guest yeah. Yeah, long gone. Cspan you dont have to worry about it if youre eating. Guest yeah, when the pigs dead, the virus is dead. Cspan ok. Guest before you cook the pig, its dead. You dont have to worry. And you have toyou have to get it into your lungs. If you eat the pig, you know, its not going to get into your lungs. But anyway, its dead. So inin Southern China, what they do is theythey have this very clever way of growing rice, an ancient way. They grow the rice and they let loose ducks on their rice paddies. And the ducks only eat the weeds, they dont like the rice. And then when they harvest the rice, theythey put the ducks back in the restrestamong the rest of the farm animals, including the pigs. Now the pigs can now get the duck virthe duck flu viruses. And the people that are very close to the pigs, the people can get the viruses from the pigs, and so you can end up with a new flu starting there that can then spread from there around the world and the reasonthis is kind of interesting for 1918. Its not clear where the 1918 flu started, but there is at least one researcher, a guy named Kennedy Shortridge in hong kong, who isis prettyishas this idea that itsthe 1918 flu actually started earlier in Southern China. He says he has Historical Records to indicate that people in Southern China were getting sick with something that looked like this flu and the chinese laborers were sent to europe to dig the trenches. So he thinks that Southern China started the 1918 flu. Like he says, it started every other major pandemic in this century. Cspan now just three years ago, you justyou say hong kong had a big scare in 1997. Guest they did. Cspan what was that . And diddid we know about that here . I mean, did people. Guest well, ii knew about it, but i didnt pay a lot of attention to it because i thought scientists were overreacting. I no longer think that. But at the time, what had happened was there were somethere was a flu in hong kong that seemed to be killing young people. They were getting really sick and they were dying. Cspan beyou mentioned one young. Guest well, first there was one young boy who died. He got sick and he died. And it was very strange, because this doesnt normally happen. And there was a big investigation what kind of flu did he have . It turned out that he had a bird flu. And thats really weird, because bird flus dont normally infect people. So immediately sort of the alarm bells go off. Is this a bird flu thats going to infect people and startis this the beginning of a pandemic, because scientists always have 1918 on their mind. When theyit turned out, though, that nobody else except for this boy seemed to be getting the fluhis family members didntdidnt seem to be exbe getting it. Nobody in his school. It was juthis little kid. And no one knew, actually, where he got it. There was this big investigation and no one knew exactly how he got that bird flu. None of the hospital workersbecause he died in the hospitalseemed to have been exposed. So scientists said, ok, well, this waswe dont know what it was, but luckily its going nowhere. then a few months later, people started showing up in the hospitals of Hong Kongyoung peopledying of a flu. And it turned out to be a bird flu. And that was really terrifying, because it looked like something was happening in hong kong. An International Team of investigators, along with the very able investigators from hong kong, didid an extensive investigation. And what they discovered was it seemed that there was a flu that was infecting chickens in hong kong and it was going fromjumping from chickens to people, which is really unusual, and it was deadit could be deadly. It didnt seem to be spreading from person to person, but it was a flu that was even killing chickens, and they dont normally die of the flu. And so theywhat theythe big fear waswas that if they leave thisif they dont do anything, that this flu would then infect a person and the person would also get a human flu, and in their lungs the two flus would merge and out would come a birdtype flu that could infect people and wed have 1918 all over again. In order to protect the world, the Hong Kong Government ordered that every chicken in hong kong be killed. It was a huge number of chickens, over a million chickens, because in hong kong people like to buy their chickens at these markets where theyre killed in front of your eyes, so you dont just go to a Grocery Store and buy a dead chicken. You buy a live chicken and see it killed. So they had thesetheyre called wet markets where all these chickens are in cages. And they ordered every single chicken killed. I think now that it wasat the time, i thought it was weird. Now i think it was a good idea. Cspan how do we get the flu . Guest we get it when somebody around us has it and they cough or sneeze. Cspan and how do they get it . I mean, how does it start . The very first time that somebody gets the flu, do they eat it or do they. Guest no, they breathe it. Cspan they breathe it. Guest they usually breathe it in, or they get the virus on their hands and they touch their nose or mouth. It has to get into your lungs and usually you breathe it. And the reason you tend to get it in the winter they think is because, you know, youre inside more, theres more people that are coughing and sneezing, and it also lives longer in the air when the airs dry. So we get it in our winter, and in the southern hemisphere, they get it in their winter. Cspan so is there any way, you know, other than the flu shot, to protect yourself from getting the flu right now . Guest well, you could barricade yourself somewhere, but. Cspan but you get it from the air, though. I mean. Guest you get it from the air. Theres not much you can really do. You can stay away from people, wash your hands a lot. I dont know. Mainly, you need a flu shot. Cspan so you think flu shots are a good idea. Guest i never had one till this year. When i wrote that book, i said, why was i so stupid . and i had one and i made my whole family get them. Weve all had them. Cspan do you have children . Guest i have two children. Cspan how old are they . Guest eighteen and 21. Theyre in college. And i said, i want you to get a flu shot and i want you to call me and tell me you got it. and they thought that was being totally ridiculous and then they each called, mom, we got our cflu shots tonight. cspan your husband got his . Guest yep, he got his. Cspan whats he do, by the way . Guest hes a mathematician and he works for a nonprofit society in philadelphia nonprofit math society. Cspan you all live in philadelphia . Guest no, we live in princeton, halfway between new york and philadelphia. Cspan back to this. When you had this idea, what year was it, to write this book . Guest it was, like, 1998. Cspan and when you first called, did you call your agent . Did you call the. Guest my agent called me. I have one of these really aggressive agents. Cspan who is it . Guest john brockland. Cspan andand whatd he. Guest he called me and said, dont you think theres a book here in this flu stuff . , which is what he typically does. And i said, well, i guess so. I think it might be kind ofit might be really interesting. i didnt know the full story then, but ii sawid seen enough pieces of it just from doing reporting for the New York Times, where ithat made methat made me think that there was actually a real story to tell, a story that wouldwould have a beginning, a middle and an sand i was hoping an end, so that you would be able to read it like you were reading, i was hoping, a novel and not just like reading a textbook. Cspan so when did you really know that you had something unique . Guest when i got a contract. Cspan but i mean when you. Guest when Farrar Straus said they were going to publish it. Cspan no, but when youwhat i mean by that is when you werestarted to do your research and you saw. Guest oh. Oh, when johan hultin found thethe virus in alaska, that was when i realized there was truly a story here, because when it happened was. Cspan and heres a picture of him in what year . Guest that was in 1950, i believe, or 1951, when he first went to alaska. Cspan and then theres a picture right above it, which is from where . Guest ok, theres onetherestheres two pictures of him. Cspan the one who hadand inwhen theyre in thein the dirtin the dirt. Guest thats the same year. Thats the same. Cspan yeah, but where is that . Guest thats in alaska. Its inits in the alaskan tundra. And below that, hes in his laboratory. Cspan and what is he digging up there in that hole up on top . Guest a mass grave, where almost every eskimo adult in ain a tiny village, in a little remote lutheran mission, had died of the flu and theyd been buried all in one grave. And. Cspan how many . Guest i think about 80. Cspan did the whole village go . Guest ninety percent of the adults. They hadall the kids were left orphaned. Cspan in 1950no, 1918. Guest 1918, thats right. Cspan andand who is johan hultin . Guest hes the pathologist. He washe was a swedishhe came to this country as a medical student, and he just was going to study for one year in iowa, at the university of iowa. And he came here and hewhhe was a real adventurer, so he decided that what he would do, he and his wife, before he started school, he would travel to every state, everyall 50 states. So they got agot a car and they started driving around and they ended up in alaska. And while he was in alaska, he met a paleontologist and he and his wife spent the summer with this paleontologist, sort of going around with him on his travels. The next year in medical school, visiting virologists said, there was this terrible tragedy in 1918, and the only way were ever going to know what happened is if somebody could just find somebody that was buried in the permafrost where the ground never thaws and their lungs are still frozen and then maybe we could get the virus out and find out what it was. so johan hultin said, oh, well, i know how to do this. I know this paleontologist. I can find out where the eskimo villages were. I can get a map of the permafrost. I can find out where were their graves, where people might be in the permafrost. And i could go up there and actually find a flu victim. so hehe did do this. It was sort of an amazing adventure. He was still a soyoungthis young student. He went to alaska. He had three possible villages where he thought maybe he could find some bodies from the 1918 flu. It was like the three bears the first one wasnt right, and then the next one wasnt right; the third village, the mass grave was exactly right, this Little Village called brevig. He said to the eskimos, there was a terrible tragedy in 1918 and id like toid like your permission to dig in this grave and to try to find some flu victims so that i can get that virus. We could make a vaccine and you will never have to suffer like this again. they told him it wasthat it was ok to do it. The story of how he did it is an adventure in itself, but hehe did manage toto get somesome lung tissue still frozen from flu victims from 1918 and bring it back with him to iowa where he tried to grow it, and thats what that second picture of him in a lab was. Today, its sort of horrifying to think that someone was trying to grow the 1918 virus, but he hadnt really thought aboutvery carefully about the consequences. He was growing it in chicken eggs, which is to this day how they grow flu viruses. And he kept injecting chicken eggs with the lung tissue hoping to grow that virus. But nothing happened, so he concluded it was dead, but he never forgot that grave and the 1918 flu. And he always swore that one day, he would go back there, when science advanced enough, so he could do something with that tissue and he would try again to findsolve the mystery of the 1918 flu. Cspan so weve got the 1918 flu itself, which killed a half a million americans. Guest right. Cspan and then youve got a 1951 trip by this scientist. Guest right. Right. Cspan he isfrom 51 to present, where is he located in this time . Guest hes a pathologist in the San Francisco area doing lots of other thingsclimbing all sorts of mountains around the world, still being an adventurer, but always thinking about this flu and always reading everything he could about influenza and molecular biology and wondering when would the time be right for him to go back again to alaska and try to do something to find out about this virus . Cspan so we jumped from 51 up to 1995 . Guest right, yeah. Cspan and you mentioned Jeffrey Taubenberger. Guest right. Cspan . Who was out here at the Pathology Institute. Guest institutearmed forces institute of pathology. Cspan is he a military man . Guest no, hes not. Cspan hes a civilian. Guest hes a civilian. Cspan and whats his background . Is he a medical doctor . Guest yeah, he is. He got a md, phd degree, so hes both a medical doctor and also was trained as a phd scientist. Hehe had justhe just sort of stumbled into this kind of a career. Hes ahes a brilliant man who always asks the right questions, but hes an outsider to the flu field. And he got interested in influenza because he andhis lab had been askedone of the things they do in the Pathology Lab there is theyretheyre sort of contheythey answer questions for other people in the military. And one of the questions hed been asked was why were dolphins dying . So one of the military veterinarians said he thought that dolphins around the world were dying because they were infected with a measleslike virus. And he said to taubenberger, ifcan youif we give you decayed dolphin tissue andcan you pull out a measles virus, if its there . so taubenbergers labs got so good at doing this, they actually did pull out a measleslike virus. And he said, i wonder what else we could do with ourwith our expertise . and thats what led him to start looking for the 1918 flu virus in the lung tissues. Cspan in 1995 . Guest thats right. Cspan so hes got the big piPathology Institute with three million specimens of all different kinds of disease. Guest but he hadnt gone there before for anything. Cspan he hadnt. Guest he never had gone there for things. Thats right. He said. Cspan and you have johan hultin, who is out in San Francisco. Guest right. Cspan . Doesnt even know hes doing this. Guest right. Thats right. And then johan hultin saw Jeffrey Taubenbergers article in Science Magazine, where taubenberger says, i have got thisthis sample from the warehouse. I can start to pull out these genes. and hultin wrote him a letter and said, if ii think i could get you another sample. Would you be interested . and he sort of carefully tried to explain who he was so taubenberger wouldnt think he was crazy. And taubenberger wrote back and said, well, yeah, of course, im really interested. and hultin said, ok. Well, i cant do it this week, but i can probably go out there next week. and the reasonhe didnt want to say it at the timethe reason he didnt want to go out that week was hed been working for 25 years building a replica of a 14th century norwegian cabin in some Mountain Property he had and he was just about finished it, and he wanted to finish it up before he went to alaska. Cspan by the way, professor hultindr. Hultin is how old . Guest nowhes in his 70s now. He was 71, i believe, when he went up there. Cspan and je dr. Taubenbergers how old . Guest i think about half his age, when this story. Cspan now theres a picture missing from your book of Kirsty Duncan. Guest oh, right. Cspan why no picture of Kirsty Duncan . Guest you want to know the truth . Cspan sure. Guest ok. I had wanted to put a picture of Kirsty Duncan in and the problem was that she kept writing these letters that indicated that in order to use the picture, she wanted to have some sort of control over what was said. And. Cspan does that track withi meanii mean, im asking a leading question based on what. Guest i mean, i can understand if she was worried aboutyou know, shes worried about would everything be right . Would it be the version she would want to be in there . But as a journalist, you cant let somebody control whats said in a book. I mean, i want to be absolutely accurate. I will check facts forever. I will check anything, but i cant tell you that you can write it for me. Cspan well, tell us what she looks like. Guest oh, shes got waistlong hair. Shes very tiny. Cspan how tall . Guest shes about 5 feet tall, so shes really little. Shes. Cspan how old is she . Guest shesi think now shes about 30 or so. Shes very young. Shes geographer. Cspan where does she live . Guest shes lives in windsor, ontario. I think she recently got married. She usedshe was living with her parents. She was mari think she recently got married for the second time. Shes sort of inintense looking, very intensevery, very intenselooking person. Cspan youve interviewed her . Guest yes, and shes veryvery passionate, extremely passionate. Cspan well, how did she get into all this . Guest she had the same idea as johan hultin. She wanted to find bodies in the permafrost. Cspan why . Guest she read a book called americas forgotten pandemic about the 1918 flu by a historian and she was just truly moved to tears, she says, by this story. And she said, ishe was ashes a geographer. Cspan where was she living at the time . Guest she was living in canada. Cspan she is a canadian geographer. Guest yes, she is. Cspan whered she go to school, by the way . Guest i dont know. Cspan i know you mention in the book the university of windsor. Ii. Guest thats where she was working as a geographer. Cspan working. Ok. Guest and so she said, ii think i can find some bodies in the permafrost and get this virus and my primary concern is safety, unlike hultin, who was just going to go up there by himself and not tell anybody. If he found nothing, he was never going to tell a soul, because he didnt want the eskimos to become sort ofpart of a media circus. She decided that she wanted to make this ansomething that everybody knew about, that they would all understand the urgency for doing this, and so that she could do this in thein the safest manner possible, because she didnt want to unleash an ean epidemic on the world. Cspan what year did she start her research . Guest you know, iveiyoud think id remember all these years, wouldnt you . She started it in the 1990s as well, but i cant remember the exact year that she started to search. Cspan but the article in Science Magazine came out when . Do you remember . Guest it wai think it was 97. Cspan and she had done it before or after . Did she know about the Science Magazine article . Guest she knew that theyshewell, she didnt know about johan hultin. She knew that Jeffrey Taubenberger was onto something, while she was doing her story. Cspan and there was some kind of a committee orthatthat dr. Taubenberger served on with her. Guest thats right, because she was trying to get money from the National Institutes of health. And there was a big meeting and they were saying, ok, so should we giveshe had found what she thought were the bodies of seven miners on a tiny Remote Island near the Arctic Circle off of norway. And they. Cspan howd she find them . Guest well, she had goneshe wouldshed beenwith hait was sort of a coincidence. She hadshed learned that that was aan area of permafrost and then she started investigating to see if there might be any bodies there. And she found about these seven miners that had journeyed off from norway to work in the winter in the mines on this little island, and they had gotten sick with the flu on thison the boat on the way over and died practically as soon as they arrived. She learned that they were buried in marked graves and she learned thatand then she got permission to digfrom the norwegian government to dig into those graves and try to get thethe miners bodies, so she had to raise money. And she was raising money anyfrom the government, private industry. Cspan this may not be a fair question, but why is a canadian asking the National Institute ofof health here in the untied states for money to do a Research Project . Guest because she put together an International Team and she was looking for money. Andand one of her team members was an american and she was an american virologist. So he was sort of, like, the lead person trying to ask for money from the National Institutes of health. Cspan how much money did she need . Guest i dont know. She got millions ofseveral Million Dollars. I think she got like ashe didnt get a lot from the nithe nnih, Something Like a quarter million, but she got money from merck, she got momoney from the british. She got a bunch of money. Cspan and all along, Jeffrey Taubenbergers already discovered. Guest well, but it wouldnt hurt to have some more samples. I mean, its not like itsitstheres anything wrong with getting some morebutbut she didnt know about johan hultin when she was doing it, and taubenberger tried to tell her, he said, that they had three samples. And sheat first, she said, well, his samples from the warehouse didnt count, because they werethey were soaked in formaldehyde and maybe something happened to the virus. What you need are some frozen samples, so he tried to say that they had a frozen sample. And she doesnt think that she quite understood what he was trying to tell her, but she wanted to go ahead anyway. And she did go ahead. Cspan theres one little ingredientim not sure of the timing on this bebecause we havent talked about it. Johan hultin went back to alaska. Guest tohe went back to alaskaim sorryand he didhe did dig into that grave again, he did get a sample, he senthe divided it into four pieces that hehe didnt want ithe put it in a preservative, sent it to Jeffrey Taubenberger. He sent itbeing johan hultin, everything is sort of done on a lowtech scale. So he decided this was a really precious sample of lof lung tissue and he didnt want to just trust the mail, so he sent. Cspan and this is the picture of him here just a few years ago, where he went back there. Guest thats right cspan jumped from 51he went back there because of the Science Magazine article. Guest right. And. Cspan here he is. Guest . Back in thein the grave site again getting another lung sample. He sent back it to hultin, he sand to taubenberger. He divided it into four pieces. One was sent ups, one Federal Express and i think the other one express mail. He actually used the mail, so he usedhe sent it in four different ways. They all got to taubenberger. Taubenberger found thethe viral genes in there and started working on them. Meanwhile, Kirsty Duncan, with her multimilliondollar, huge expedition, went off to this island off the coast of norway with the media in tow and film crews and. Cspan how muchi mean, you said at one podiddid i read 10 cameras there at one point or. Guest i think there was like 10 camera crews. There were all sorts of documentaries being made. And sheit wasit was ait was a veryit was a big media extravaganza. Cspan anybody at alland i shouldnt probably use this wordsuspicious of what she was doing with all the Media Attention and the money involved . And was there. Guest well. Cspan . Any controversy of what she was doing . Guest . There was a lot of controversy all along. People werepeople were susppeoplescientists do get suspicious when theres a lot of media involvement. I mean, im part of the media, so itsi hate to say this, but they do get suspicious when something seems to be sort of blown up like that. And all the talk about safety, safety, safety started to seem like almost hype to a lot of people. And so what happened was there was a lot of animosity, and there were a lot of people that were angry with her. And Kirsty Duncan waswais a very passionate, very emotional person. She dresses in a way that doesnt look like a scientist, wearing high heels and spandex and stuff, which i think alsoi hate to say it, but i think that also sort of made people think she wasnt a serious person. I think, to her, this wasshe was serious about trying to find this virus. I think she was genuinely moved by the stories, and i think she really hoped that she would be able to find a virus in these norwegian miners. Cspan so Jeffrey Taubenberger is on that committee with her. Guest he was. Cspan meantime, johan hultin goes to alaska, finds the body. Guest right. Cspan . Gets the sample, sends it back. Guest and he already had that sample when he was on the committee with her, but hethe problem was that hultin had toldand so he was hinting arhe was saying, we have another sample. We have another sample. but hehultin had told the eskimos that they were going to be the ones who determined when he made the announcement. He said he wasnt going to sort of spring the media and all the world on them; that they could decide how thehow to release this information. And so he was waiting for them to give him the goahead to say he went up there, hed gotten the samples. There was this mass grave cause see he never announced it. Cspan and hedid he pay for this by himself, by the way . Guest yeah, he did. It cost him about 2,000. Cspan and he did it on his own. He did it very quickly. Guest thats right. Cspan it didnt take him years to get the money and all that. Guest no, it took himhe just went up there immediately. The next week, he was up there with his pickax, sleeping on the floor of the oneroom schoolhouse in a slon aon an air mattress ready to dig in those graves. He got the permission of the eskimos. And in 1951, he did it all by himself. This time they gave him a couple teenagers to help him dig, whichwhich helped him a lot. Cspan now go back to norway. Guest right. They hadthey had everything. Cspan how many people weredid youdid you go to that spot, by the way . Guest i didnt. I actually was on vacation when that happened. We did, but it was. Cspan and what year again . Guest i think it waswas it 98 . One of my colleagues was there, John Noble Wilford of the New York Times. Cspan a writer for the New York Times. Guest yeah. Everybody went. I mean, everybody went there. Cspan and theyre all standing there, as theyre about to try to take a sample. Guest well, they couldnt get near the grave. Cspan they couldnt. Guest . Because they said, what if theres a virus . cspan oh. Guest they were all sort of herded off in the distance. And they started to dig into this grave site, and sheevery day, she would issue a press release. And what happened was it turned out the ground wasnt frozen. They had done elaborate radar work ahead of time, and they said, the ground is frozen. Its permafrost. And we see thewe see the bodies, and its going to be fine. and when they started to dig, they found out that the miners were buried above the permafrost in ground that was not frozen. So she saidshe issued a press release that said, we have succeeded. Weve gotten soft tissue. and people who were there told me that, actually, what she basically had was skeletons and that there wasthat they took bone tissue, and they also took some tissue from brain, but there was basthere was no lung there. And sheshe now. Cspan you had to have lung tissue . Guest well, thats where the virus grows. And its unheard of for the virus to grow in the brain. However, theres onetheres one strange thing about this virus. There are some people who thought atwho thought that maybe the 1918 flu virus had sparked an epidemic of parkinsons disease. Thats a degenerative brain disease where brain cells die. And so whatand then you might say, well, why wouldhow would you even know . well, there was a parkinsons disease epidemic after 1918. In fact, when oliver sacks wrote his book awakenings about people with parkinsons disease, they were thethe people who supposedly got it after 1918. And sobut still, if everybodys getting the flu and then everybody gets parkinsons disease, so what . Why is there a cause and effect there is one piece of information that was kind of interesting. In samoa, theres one group of islands where they said, we dont want this flu. No ships are going to dock here. and they escaped the flu. And another group of islands where ships docked and they got the flu, the people who didnt get the flu didnt get parkinsons disease. The islands where they did get this flu, they did have the epidemic. But nobodys ever heard of a flu virus getting into the brain. Flu viruses need an enzyme to clip one of their proteins, which is not found in the brain. So as far as anybody has ever known or ever been able to show, a flu virus does not live outside the lungs. So if she did not get lung tissue, she should not be able to get a flu virus, period. Cspan so were there documentaries made . Guest there were documentaries made, yeah. Cspan showingand they couldnt show the actual exhu. Guest no, no, no. Cspan . Exhumation . Guest they showed the wholein fact, nova did a huge deal on this thing, but it didntitit turned out to bebecause it didnt work so well, it turned out to also include a lot of the taubenberger stuff, too. In fact, they then. Cspan so he didhe was included in all this . Guest . They thenthey then made it into a documentary. They were there from the very beginning with Kirsty Duncan. From the very beginning, when she started pulling her Team Together and saying, lets discuss this possibility, going to norway, she had the cameras rolling. But when it didnt work so well, theythe documentary became a documentary about the race with taubenberger and his group withand hultin vs. Kirsty duncan with an International Team of experts and millions of dollars and the whole world was watching. And. Cspan did you reach any conclusions about the way money was generated through this . Guest well, it was very interesting to me that the most exciting work on the flu was being done by the outsiders, hultin and taubenberger, who were doing it in a very quiet, lowkey way. And it was really interesting to me that you didnt need these elabthis elaborate and expensive apparatus to go dig into a grave site and ask whether you could get some frozen tissue. Cspan ive gotta ask you one other little personal thing, because you bring up john oxford in here and his marriage. Whats the story, and who is he . Guest john oxford is ahes aa british virologist, and he was a member of Kirsty Duncans team. And he began to exchange a lot of faxes with Kirsty Duncan that hawas sort of disturbing his daughter because they soundedherher faxes to him and her phone calls to him soundedthey were so personal and so emotional. Andand, also, according to hisjohn oxfords adult daughter, esther oxford, john oxfords wife was also getting a little bit concerned. When Kirsty Duncans marriage broke up, the first person she called was john oxford. John oxford, by that time, had gotten her grants from thefrom the british for her andand paved the way for a lot of her work. He had a falling out with her and hei think hes still a member of the tehe is still a member of the team, but he no longer isiiwhatever their relationship is, and as far as i knowi have no reason to believe its anything other than just letters, faxes, telephone calls. Ii dont believe its anything else, but its not what it used to be. There is sort of a chill in thin their relationship. Cspan before i ask you about the center for Disease Control, what is your conclusion up till now about whats gone on with all this . Dodo wedo we know, and was all this worth it . Guest yes, i think so. Ievery time i speak toto scientists about the 1918 flu, i say, are we going to see another flu like this . and they say, yes. they say, we just dont know when, because theres no way of predicting whats going to happen when and how the flu virus is going to mutate. I think its definitely important to try to understand how a flu virus can turn into such a killer, and if theyif they cant find out by looking at all eight genes of this virus, at the very least, theylltheyll be able to do experiments that can say, maybe itll take 100 changes to turn a flu virus into something, but what is it that it actslike, maybe theres no one change. Maybe theres hundreds of them. But they can say, what does it do . What can you do to protect yourself . How do you stop this virus . cspan ok, whats differencewhats different in 19or in the year 2000 than in 1918, if this kind of a pandemic were to start again . Guest oh. Ok, theres two big differences. One is vaccine. In 1918, there were no vaccines. Now the big fear that everybody has is if they see a virus like this coming, and they have the sixmonth notice, which they are expecting to have to make a vaccine, that people will think that scientists are just crying wolf and will not habe vaccinated, and then. Cspan but theythey wont have a sixmonth notice for everybody, though. Guest well, theyre hoping to havetheyre hopingwell, no, they may not. Cspan i mean, wdoesnt it start somewhere . So you. Guest yeah, it has to start somewhere. Not everybodys going to get it. Butbut if they haveif they can get vaccine going as fast as they can, that theyyou could protect most of the world from the virus and sort of stop the pandemic from starting, if people believe the scientists this wasthey had to have a vaccine. The second big difference is antibiotics. A lot of people who died in 1918 died notmany of them died because of the flu itself, but then others got very ill from the flu, and while they were sick, bacteria came into their lungs and they died of bacterial infection. And people still do die of bacterial infections today when they get the flu, but we have antibiotics now, and we didnt have them then. And theyll make a huge difference in the death toll. Cspan nancy coxwho is she . Guest shes theshe heads the Virology Research at the centers for Disease Control in atlanta. Cspan whats that . Guest thats the nationthis is thethe National Center where they look at thingtheyre like thethe disease detectives. Cspan how big a place is it . Guest its like aits like the National Institutes of health here. Its a campuslike thing, withwith thesewith lots of big buildings. Cspan who funds it . Guest the nathe federal government. Cspan a lot of money . Guest dont know, but i dont think its enough. Cspan do you think it should be more whatever. Guest i think it should be more, yeah. Cspan now she got a call on this whole hong kong thing back in 97. Guest thats right. Cspan i meani mean, id be interested in knowing when do you start to panic . You know, whenwhen is. Guest well, she started to panic as soon as she heard that there was a bird flu killing kids. I mean, she was really scared. She got a call when she was on her vacation in wyoming, and she wasand she was tossing and turning. She was really worried. Cspan i mean, you say in the book she was awawake many nights worrying about it. Guest thats right, she was. But. Cspan what dowhat do they worry about, though . Guest they worry thatthatyou have toyou have to get at this thing fast, and you have to find out what is it . How is it spreading . How easily is it spreading . Where is this virus . Is it only in hong kong . Is it elsewhere . Howshouldwhat should you do . Should youshould you ask for vaccines to be made . Should you ask for another 1976type thing to happen . Cspan is the cdc our frontline defense . Guest it is. Cspan for all these kind of things . Guest they are. Theyre the ones who look at aids, ebola, everything you worry about. Cspan and, again, go back to the difference between the 1918 flu and the flu were having this year. Whatwhat hain 18, what happened to the body . Guest well, people would very quickly, almost overnight, die because their lungs would fill with fluid. You would have a young person who would start to feel sick and, within hours or a day or so, they would be gasping for breath. Their skin would be turning dark because theytheir blood wasnt getting enough oxygen. One person saiddescribed it as mahogany spots on the cheekbones, and then the colorsthe dark colors starting to spread. We dont see that today. Today what you see is you feel very ill, and some people are dying, but nobodys getting sort of instant death as they were getting then. Cspan are you surprised about what you got in this book, based on what you started with . Guest yeah. Yeah. That was what apart of thepart of the reason ii really enjoyed working on this book. Because the more i worked on it, it was like the story just kept Getting Better and better and growing and growing. Scientists andandand historians were extraordinarily generous with me, too. I mean, people were amazing. Ed kilbourne, whos one of the people that i reference in this book a lothe was a flu expert. He was there in 1976. I was calling him and emailing him constantly trying to get records from 1976. He was taking them down from his attic, and finally he sent me an email saying, im just going to keep all my files in my living room until you finish your book, gina. but he waspeople were willing to go through their old records, go through their old files, give me documents, try to reconstruct what had happened, how they had felt, what they said, why. They were so generous that i was just stunned. Johan hultin was amazing, looking for Old Newspaper articles, old photographs, old documents. He would try to do anything he could to sort of help me reconstruct his story and go beyond just his memory of what had happened. Cspan were out of time. Youre going totheres a lot more in this. Here it is. Its a book called flu by gina kolata, the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it. Thank you very much. Guest thank you. Great