Lucy and the 1918 Pandemic

The 1918 pandemic consisted of three waves with high fatality, an estimated 50 million deaths globally - 5x the military losses of WW1.

In 1951 the pathologist tried to isolate the 1918 influenza virus from victims who had been buried in the Alaskan permafrost of a town called Brevig Mission. During the pandemic, 72 of the town's 80 residents perished from the flu. In his search, he unearthed bodies but failed to find any live viruses.

Nearly 50 years later, in July 1997, Hultin read an article in the journal Science written by virologist Jeffery Taubenberger who was looking for samples of the 1918 flu. Hultin offered his services and returned to Brevig Mission. Again he received permission to dig for victims of the 1918 "Spanish flu", and this time he unearthed the remains of an obese woman, roughly thirty years old, whom he christened "Lucy".

The fat had protected her lungs from decay, and he took both of them. It turned out that in Lucy's case there was enough material to sequence the complete 1918 virus many times over. This sample provided scientists a first-hand opportunity to study the virus, which was inactivated with guanidinium thiocyanate before transport. This sample and others found in U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) archives allowed researchers to completely analyze the critical gene structures of the 1918 virus. Using the recovered traces, scientists revealed that the virus originated from birds and mutated to infect people.

In 2004, Tumpey at CDC ‘rescues’ the 1918 flu virus in a high containment CDC lab. In 2005 the CDC shows that the 1918 virus causes severe pneumonia in mice and identifies the genes responsible for it’s high virulence.