-
Chapter 1: Influenza: Virus and History
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
21 By any measure, the scientific and medical breakthroughs of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries are truly astounding. For millennia, human societies attributed their sickness and afflictions to angry gods, misaligned cosmological events, evil witches, or any number of other supernatural causes. It is stunning to consider that the knowledge that most diseases are caused by discrete, invasive microscopic agents (or “germs”) is only about 150 years old. Not until the early twentieth century did people finally abandon the idea that diseases can be caused by malodorous vapors, or miasmas. Medical knowledge about illnesses and the organisms that cause them has increased at a dizzying and breathtaking pace. Scientific research began as an individual pursuit, undertaken largely for its own sake. As such, it was a comparatively slow-paced endeavor, for beyond the few who possessed enough resources and leisure to permit full-time scientific inquiry, the people conducting it had to squeeze it into their spare time. In addition, the exchange of data, information, or ideas—the lifeblood of science —was often blocked and almost always excruciatingly slow. Such limitations make the achievements of individuals such as Harvey or Lavoisier all the more heroic and those places where free scientific inquiry held sway, such as tenth-century Baghdad and sixteenth-century Padua, all the more glittering. chapter 1 Influenza: Virus and History • 22 influenza: virus and history By the nineteenth century, research was still an individual avocation, but the exchange of information was beginning to flow much more freely and rapidly. Advancement in science still relied on heroic soloists such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch (though by now such individuals typically worked in academia), but their breakthroughs quickly stimulated debate and inspired others to expand on their discoveries. By the turn of the twentieth century, financial support and interest in scientific research had begun to draw more attention from powerful states. State-supported research had traditionally focused on useful implements for war—da Vinci had peddled siege engines and defenses against them for Italian city-states, and Archimedes had bent his genius to protecting Syracuse from the besieging Romans—but institutions were now increasingly developing around research areas removed from or at least only tangentially connected to national defense. By the twentieth century, a number of state-supported and independent entities were pursuing a host of research avenues. At first these state-supported organizations competed with the institutions and researchers of rival nations, each trying to outdo the others in advancing science, but eventually the most technologically advanced states began to coordinate and cooperate on mutually beneficial goals. Transnational and international committees of experts began to form, and once they did, they began to develop their own goals and directions. Even as these international organizations pursued their own, technical agendas, however, their reliance on nation-states for support and financing kept an inherent tension alive. Some powerful independent organizations of the present day, such as the Gates Foundation, command vast resources of their own, yet this tension between international goals and national financing remains an issue. It would be remiss to suggest that the history of scientific advancement resulted from a logical progression of new information and ideas and that global institutions naturally evolved from national organizations. Instead, science progresses in fits and starts with numerous blind alleys followed and numerous competing hypotheses and theories advanced. Over time compelling information and models win out, but the process is necessarily messy and discordant. The study of the influenza virus and influenza pandemics illustrates this larger pattern of scientific development; in fact, because of the difficulties in studying this virus, scientific research on influenza provides a compact narrative mirroring the larger process of scientific advancement. In some ways, the study of the influenza virus had a late start. Initially the illness was misattributed to a bacterial infection. As late as the 1930s, the fact that the disease is caused by a virus remained unknown. In the decades after the discovery of the influenza virus, however, increasingly powerful [18.234.139.149] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:05 GMT) influenza: virus and history 23 technologies and tools were used to crack its secrets. Today scientists can speak confidently about the behavior of the virus, discuss its interactions with the human immune system during the course of infection, and study the genetic makeup of viral strains to the last base pair. Nonetheless, despite this wealth of information, predicting the distribution pattern of influenza viruses in the human population remains an...