Hunting the 1918 Flu: One Scientist's Search for a Killer Virus (review)

The worst pandemic on record, the "Spanish" Influenza of 1918–19, has received increased attention as World Health Organization officials warn of the wide spread across Southeast Asia of a new strain of avian influenza. Consequently, the publication in March 1997 of a paper in Science, reporting a successful attempt to sequence part of the 1918 flu virus from a long-stored tissue sample, had an extraordinary impact. The possibility of finding the lost virus had been considered so unlikely that only a few influenza virologists had ever attempted it, and none had succeeded—and it had been accomplished, not by virologists, but by a group of molecular pathologists who were strangers to the tightly knit world of flu science. The paper—by Jeffrey Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.—had one avid reader in particular: Kirsty Duncan, Ph.D., of the University of Windsor, Ontario. Taubenberger, a pathologist, and Duncan, a geographer, were both young, ambitious outsiders whom the flu world viewed at first with suspicion. Five years earlier, Duncan had read Alfred W. Crosby's pathbreaking book America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (1989), and she became determined to find the cause of the pandemic. By 1997, she had assembled a team that was also chasing the virus of the 1918 flu.

Duncan located the unembalmed bodies of seven victims of the 1918 pandemic buried in the permafrost of an island in the Norwegian Arctic, and she determined to go dig them up. While the teams began as friends—Taubenberger was initially an advisor to Duncan's group—they emerged as bitter rivals. And to the degree that the rivalry was a race, Taubenberger's group won: his team has now sequenced much of the 1918 viral genome. In contrast, the bodies that Duncan journeyed to within 800 kilometers of the North Pole to find were not frozen, and little has been recovered from them. The story of the rivalry has been told in two popular-science books: Pete Davies's Catching Cold: 1918's Forgotten Tragedy and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus That Caused It (1999; published in the United States a year later as The Devil's Flu), and Gina Kolata's FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It (1999). Both books focus primarily on the Taubenberger team; neither is kind to Duncan, dismissing her as impractical at best and manipulative at worst.

Comes now Duncan herself to speak for herself. This is an important addition to the story of the search for the 1918 virus, relating in detail the assumptions, disagreements, and frustrations that dogged Duncan's work with her seventeen team members—who were all male, almost all older than she was, and mostly highly distinguished in fields of which she had little knowledge. So it is a pity that this is not a better book. Hunting the 1918 Flu is an odd work, a first-person narrative that falls somewhere between legal brief and memoir. Duncan suggests in her preface that she was subjected to "ageism and sexism" (p. xiv), and a major portion of the book is devoted to documenting those contentions, quoting from hundreds of phone, fax, and e-mail conversations between herself and her fractious team. Her account of her gradual loss of control over one sector of the team—led by a scientist who first offered support and funding and then, in Duncan's version of the events, attempted to take credit for her work—is persuasive and saddening.

And yet: During the Arctic expedition, the few journalists who followed the team (I was one, and I appear in several sentences in the book) remarked on Duncan's ability to keep believing in the best possible interpretation of events. There were moments when...