I never really thought much about the flu. It seemed like something that came around every year and people get sick and get better again. I never been interested in it at all but a few years ago im a reporter from the New York Times and i wrote an article for the times about a miraculous discovery. There was a guy at Walter Reed Medical Center and he was writing in a technical journal called Science Magazine that he had managed to get some samples from the soldiers who died in 1918 and in that lung tissue were fragments of the virus that had killed them and when i interviewed this man about his work he told me that the influenza pandemic of 1918 and i was stunned. I had 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 top 10 killers wrapped together, 1. 5 million americans. And i just found out by looking at the cdc papers by the centers for Disease Control that 99 percent of the people that died in this epidemic were under 65 so it was an astonishing devastating epidemic and what made the story for me was this idea that all these years later, molecular biology, theres such incredible serendipity involved that somebody could have some lung tissue that still have those vital beings in there and asked the question what was this virus . How could an influenza virus become such a killer and could it happen again and if so would we recognize it in time . Host theres one reference in the book that 20 200 Million People died worldwide in 1918. Guest historians keep ratcheting the number upwards. 40 million is an underestimate and the cdc says its a median estimate and there was a meeting of historians and people interested in the flu and south africa and theyre saying they believe the true number was closer to 100 million and approximately 20 million died on the indian subcontinent alone. Host what is influenza . Guest its a simple virus and it only lives in human lungs and while its there its only job is to take a long sell and make it into a virus factory so the virus gets in and like any other virus takes the cell machinery and forces it to make new viruses and the cell dies and the virus escapes. Its a simple little thing. Host what happens to the body then . Guest there are 4 hallmarks of influenza. One is you get a fever and you take to your bed. You have muscle aches and pains. Fever, you have a cough. You dont always sneeze but you have a cough. Host have you ever had it . Guest i had it once. Host so you know what it feels like. Guest it was so bad,five days and i still remember the miserable aches and high fever. Host in 1918 where to start . Guest thats a good question. The first time it came into the United States in a big way was in camp evans near boston and people thought at the time this might be germ warfare because they couldnt believe it was Something Like the flu and many people insisted on putting the word influenza in quotation marks area it was world war i and there are rumors there had been a greasy cloud over Boston Harbor with these germs killing people for that maybe the germans had put something into their aspirin that would kill people so when i went on the ride to camp bevins it was the most horrible thing anybody had ever witnessed. They had so many young soldiers were dying that they had to have trains to take away the dead. The bodies were stacked up like cordwood people said when they were there and it was so shocking that 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 bevins . One of them later wrote his memoirs and said i cant bear to think about this thing. This was bevins in the fall of 1918 and the deadly influenza virus demonstrated the superiority of human inventions in the taking of human life. He said these are memories burned on his brain that he would like to remove if he possibly could and when they described what happened and these doctors wanted to see an autopsy they said there are so many dead that they had to step over the bodies just to get into the autopsy room, the bodies of the dead that had been removed yet and when they watched an autopsy take place, the military doctor opened the chest of a young man who had died and there were his lungs heavy in his body filled with fluid, totally useless. The man essentially died because his lungs were filled with fluid and a doctor who had been with nothing said this must be a plague. He could not believe it. Host in your books you have these, the bottom picture there. Guest these are one of the samples of lung tissues and people of 1918. You might think what was this virus and what did we ever know and what was miraculous was there is a military warehouse, people described as being like a library of congress of the dead darted by Abraham Lincoln. Every time a military doctor doesnt autopsy is supposed to put some of the tissue and the medical records in this warehouse. There was evil who died of that flu in 1918 and at the time, doctors little snippets of the lung tissue, dipped in them in formaldehyde and sent them to the warehouse and doctor kevin berger at walter reed finally the end of this century put in a requisition for people who had died of that flu asking for the lung tissue where it had had some viral things in it and those that you just saw our 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 of 1918. Go back to this topology institute out hereat walter reed , had you been there . Yes i have. 3 million samples . They are in boxes and jars and things and its this big sort of corrugated metal warehouse and with cement floors and i guess to protect it from burning down. And they had these big racks of box after box and theres a man there already and his job is to say i think id like to get some lung samples from 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, they got the flu virus and lingered the virus that was left in their lungs and died and so theres actually the science had been computerized so we can get a computer printout of where to look, he goes over with his ladders and his books he takes down his boxes and theres cancer tumors, their brain tissue, all sorts of stuff in that warehouse and this was lung tissue. You said Abraham Lincoln started, there are samples from back in the civil war. Right after the civil war and from then on a been steadily accumulating red just like a pack rats paradise and was a brilliant idea because when they started this would know what you would use it for . The idea that in 1918 no one ever found human influenza virus so the idea that somebody someday come back and make some use of this material was just brilliant. Host im jumping way ahead, did they know what caused the influenza of 1918 . They know it was a flu virus. At this point they had three lung samples from people who died in 1918 who have those in them. Getting them out was pushing the limits of molecular biology and it takes a long time. A described like putting together a detailed mosaic piece by piece. They had gotten three of the 18 completely put together now. A are choosing them in order of the likelihood that they think they are going to get an easy answer that made that virus so deadly but the first three have told them that the flu virus thats related to bird virus, they have not provided the answer yet to why it was dangerous. Host a couple questions about the pathology, theres one person that worked there . Guest one person that i saw that im certain of. Host did you get a sense that theres a lot ofinterest or traffic . Guest i was the only person there. Host howbig a facility is it . Guest it was a big facility and warehouse in maryland , just over the border. One of the things i must admit when i picked this book up i didnt expect to get was i have a drama and theres personal stories in there that are fairly dramatic red were you surprised about the competition going on find it . By the time i started to write the book i knew there was the story and i read books for myself, i read fiction. And i like, i would write a book unless i thought there was a story because you just have toafter after chapter like a textbook , for me its not something i would be. So thats what appealed to me was that there was drama there. There was competition and it shared all the strength and weaknesses of this identity method. What book is this . Its a noncommercial looks, i guess commercial . How long did you work for the New York Times denmark. 12 years. Where you were you before that . How did you get the science . You dont even want to know, i want to be a writer, i really did but i was studying science this time i was attending graduate school, i was in mathematics i was going to get a masters instead so i just decided everyplace in the washington area, i couldnt just 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 a boring job collecting reviewers for management and i said ill take this job but you have to understand that im doing it to sort of work my way into the writing department. I took the job and shortly after i took it i said id like to write an article for you on my own time for free, take it or leave it. Just do you mind if i do it and they said okay and they published it and that was i how i did it. Host where is your hometown . Where did you go to school . Guest university of maryland and i spent a half a year at a graduate program in microbiology before i decided that was not the way you. Science magazine isbought by what kind of person . Guest its a subscription magazine and its scientists and policymakers but they have a new section is written for anybody to read. The idea is to write something so that a physicist who wants to know molecular biology doesnt have to know any of the stuff that led up to discovery,its just like writing a normal news story, all they have to do is read it and understand why its exciting. Host who owns it . Guest the National Organization for advancement of science. Its like science is a big competitor, its a british magazine, very similar. It has a new section written by scientists. Host back to 1918, was this a more devastating flu than the average one that we hearabout all the time even today . Theres no comparison. When you think about the number of dead, 1. 5 million americans have died. And in a typical flu season 20,000 by and most of them are very old or have some other sort of chronic ethical condition weakens them. Here 99 percent were under age 65 so it was a very peculiar death curve shaped like a w. The very young died and between the ages of 20 and 40 died in flu season in the middle of the w and at the end some of the old people died. I like to ask you to read page 25 if you dont mind, thomas will be, the authors brother i guess died of this area and then thomas wolfe, where did he write this russian mark. Was writing look homeward angel and i asked a number of people and they said the subscription of his brothers death was actually his brothers real name and it was the prescription was not fictionalized, thatwas what happened when his brother died of the flu. Would you mind reading thisand tell us why you put this in . Guest i think that when i talk about the flu or when people who are living today talk about the flu, its almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like. I tried to put the words and the people who had been there because when youve been there and seen it, it has a sort of an emotion that we cant, i cant capture and i dont think anybody else ive spoken to has been able to capture so the reason i put the thomas wolfe inscription is was of all the inscriptions i read about people dying of the flu, this one touched me. 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 was one of those moments that i cant forget this and thats why i put it in. Wolf came home to a depth rush, his mother was lying in a sick room upstairs while thefamily waited for what they feared was inevitable. Wolf went upstairs to the gray shaded light of the room where ben lay. And he saw in that moment and starring recognition that his beloved 26yearold brother was dying. Heresthe quote of how he died. Bens long thin body late three quarters covered by the bedding. Its outline was bitterly twisted below and an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him but was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal and the foul yellow of his face had turned red area was lit by two red flags of fever, his stiff beard was growing and wassomehow horrible , youll recall the corrupt vitality of hair which came from a rotting corpse and then lips were twisted in a contrasting grimace of torture and strangulation above his wife, goodlooking teeth and inch by inch he gasped for air into his lungs and the sound of this gasping, rapid and unbelievable filling the room and orchestrating every moment in it gave to the scene its final note of horror. The next day proved delirious. By 4 00 the appearance of death wasnear. Then ben had brief periods of unconsciousness, though most of the time he was delirious. His breathing was easier. He sung snatches of popular songs, some old and forgotten and adages of his childhood but always he returned to his quiet humming of a popular song of wartime , brief sentimental but now tragically moving as a babys prayer at twilight and then ben sank into unconsciousness. His eyes were almost close, their gray flickr was gold coated with a scene of insensibility and death. He lay quietly upon his back very straight without sign of pain and with a curious upturned trust of his face his mouth was firmly shut. Will stayed with them that night fervently praying even though his eyes did not believe in god or prayer wherever you are be good to bentonite, show him the way. Wherever you are be good to bentonite, show him the way. He lost count of minutes and hours and heard only a feeble rattle of breath. Wolf fell asleep and woke suddenly calling his family at the end was nine. Ben lay still. His body appeared to grow rigid before them had been in a lastgasp then drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration. His gray eyes opened, filled with a terrible vision of all life in the one moment. He seemed to rise forward from his pillows without support. A flame, a light, a glory and so then passed instantly,s wonderfully and unafraid. Does he say in the book what his brother did . I dont know. You say i think another statistic that Something Like 25, 28 percent of the American People got flu that year. Guest its an amazing statistic because usuallyonly a small percentage get the flu. Everybody says they have it and they have some other disease but this was an infectious flu. It spread so quickly throughout the population that people couldnt even understand how it was moving so fast and it was 25 times more deadly than normal flu and it seemed to be killing young people which is why they had such amazing deaths. Heres a photograph from 1976 of president fordand his doctor getting theshot. Whats the story behind this . 1976 scientists wereafraid the flu was coming back again. They thought the flu was related to a flu that also infected pigs at that time. Because around the same time people were dying of the 1918 flu pigs in huge numbers got influenza and started to die and people gave it to pigs or pigs gave it to people but scientists became convinced that the 1918 flu was related to a swine flu and in 1976 a young 18yearold soldierwent out on a march with his unit. He was feeling sick with the flu but he wanted to join them read on a five mile hike he collapsed and was brought back to the hospital and died. He had swine flu they finally discovered. The young and healthy guy eating a swine flu and dying. The very end of the flu season, it takes six months to make enough vaccine to protect thepopulation so president ford asked the most eminent doctors and flu experts what should we do . Do you see lets wait until next season and see if theres a problem or do you say this one death is scary enough that we got to try and protect everybody and take a swine flu vaccine and get it out to the entire nation . The decision was i think understandable, they said lets take a chance because if we get sprung and the flu is back again people are going to be dying, we will have no way of protecting them so there was a decision to make an Unprecedented Campaign to immunize all americans against swine flu. It turned out it was kind of a campaign that didnt work too well and president ford in order to try to encourage people to get the vaccine was photographed in his own flu shots. Host 130 million and it didnt turn out so well. It turned out there was no swine flu epidemic. This guy got swine flu and no one knows where he got it from you it was totally unclear how he got it. People seemed to have antibodies indicating they may have had one and recovered but nobody died except for him to read nobody was getting sick from the flu so they had a vaccine against the flu strain that was not causing any sort of problems and around the same time as everybody started getting immunized, people started saying the vaccine was actually killing people, making them sick so this was, there was a lot of fear this vaccine and i think that wanted people to this day because today you still hear people say flu vaccine, they never get the right flu strain that is worse than the disease and the vaccine can make you sick and a lot of that got started after 1976. Where in the flu season as i record this through february. How do they know who determines first of all what shot you get . A couple months ago . Theres a group of experts that there is an International Surveillance that goes on all the time and what they look at is they say whats the flu strain thats going to become the predominant one at the end of the Previous Year and what flu strains are appearing elsewhere in the world because what happens is what the flu does it every year it comes through a population and it burns itself out red 1918 did that to and everybody who could be infected and then whos been exposed to it and then it mutates. It changes a little bit and comes back again and people are vulne