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 ArmyMedical 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,