Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (43 page)

Nobody had thought to check the Institute’s vast collection for influenza-infected specimens until Taubenberger submitted a request in early 1995. Information on one promising sample popped up in the database right away: lung tissue excised from the body of Roscoe Vaughn (also spelled Vaughan in some records), a twenty-one-year-old private killed by Spanish flu at Camp Jackson, South Carolina. On September 26, 1918, Vaughn literally drowned to death in an infirmary hospital bed when his chest cavity filled with fluids. Army doctors cut out several fingertip-sized pieces from Vaughn’s lungs, encased them in candle wax, and forwarded them to Washington, where they sat, untouched, for seventy-eight years. After eighteen months of exhausting work, Taubenberger and his indefatigable lab technician, Ann Reid, were able to tease out a partial genetic sequence of Spanish influenza from the specimen. Although incomplete, this was closer than anyone else had come to decoding the virus.

Johan Hultin learned about Taubenberger’s work in the March 21, 1997, issue of
Science
magazine and promptly wrote to him, indicating
that he knew where additional and possibly better specimens could be found. Taubenberger had never heard of Hultin but was intrigued. Soon the two men connected by phone, and Hultin expressed his eagerness to return to Brevig Mission. Expeditions like these required considerable planning and years simply to secure funding, so Taubenberger tempered his enthusiasm. He thought it worth exploring, though, and asked Hultin for an approximate timetable.

“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” Hultin answered, and then further stunned Taubenberger by saying he’d use his retirement savings to underwrite the whole thing himself. Taubenberger assured Hultin that the Institute’s labs would dedicate the necessary staff time and resources to thoroughly analyze whatever he brought back from Alaska, and the two men also agreed not to tell anyone what they were up to. Hultin didn’t want the publicity, especially if his second try also proved fruitless, and somewhat in jest he told Taubenberger that he thought it best to give him deniability in the event that he (Hultin) uncovered a dormant strain of Spanish influenza and unleashed another pandemic on mankind.

True to his word, Hultin departed for Alaska a few weeks later, and he left without even having first requested permission from Brevig Mission’s town council to exhume the mass grave one more time. “When it comes to digging in cemeteries and dealing with dead ancestors, one can’t do that by phone,” Hultin recalled. “You have to go up in a very quiet, low-profile way, and talk to them about it.”

The 1918 survivors had long since passed away, but many of the older villagers remembered Hultin from his 1951 visit and how respectfully he had conducted himself. The elders allowed him to proceed and provided him with four young men to help with the excavation, a welcome relief to the seventy-two-year-old retiree, who assumed he’d have to do the backbreaking work himself. Once again he slept on an air mattress at the local school.

After three days of arduous picking and shoveling, Hultin and his team came across human remains. All skeletons, no soft tissue, and therefore no flu virus. Hultin was facing the prospect that this attempt
was also for naught, but the grave went deeper, into still-colder ground, and the men kept digging.

The next day, August 23, 1997, Hultin found a female body seven feet down that was remarkably preserved. He estimated the woman to have been in her late twenties or early thirties when she died.

“I sat on a pail—turned upside down—and looked at her,” Hultin later said of the moment.

With an autopsy knife, Hultin sliced out most of her lungs and immersed the sections in a chemical solution. Thinking it might be inappropriate to store Lucy’s organs in the school refrigerator, Hultin burrowed a hole in the ice-cold ground and placed the container there overnight. The next day he and his crew shoveled all the dirt back into the grave and replaced the sod exactly as it had looked before.

Hultin added something, too. In 1951 there were wooden crosses at each end of the burial site, but they had both rotted away to almost nothing over the years. Before rushing back to San Francisco, Hultin went into the school’s workshop and constructed two new crosses, which he mounted where the originals had stood. They were his tribute to the dead and his thank-you to the community that had shown him such hospitality.

·  ·  ·

Once he returned to San Francisco, Hultin still had the logistical matter of getting the prized specimens safely to Taubenberger. Flying to Washington, D.C., and personally delivering them would have been the quickest and most dependable option, but it was too expensive, and Hultin had already personally sunk $4,100 into the Alaska trip. He feared that if he shipped the package, though, it could get lost or ruined. Hultin divided the lungs into four pieces and, hedging his bets, sent one by UPS, one through the regular postal service, and two using Federal Express, from two different towns.

Taubenberger received all four parcels in perfect condition. Within a week he and Ann Reid verified that Lucy’s lung tissue contained Spanish influenza, and it was the same viral strain that had killed Private Roscoe Vaughn at Fort Jackson. More testing confirmed that the virus was dead, just as Hultin had found almost half a century earlier. But this time it didn’t matter. By using PCR they were able to decode its entire genetic sequence, a historic achievement in itself. Taubenberger wasn’t satisfied, however, and decided to go one step further. He wanted to bring Spanish influenza back to life.

This raised obvious ethical and security issues, since the virus—which is twenty-five times more deadly than the regular seasonal flu—could conceivably be used as a biological weapon or accidentally released. But Taubenberger believed that the benefits of re-creating the virus, publishing its genetic code, and allowing other scientists to study its makeup outweighed the dangers. To do all of this required the approval and participation of numerous government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, and the National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity. Authorization was granted, and the experiment took place in the CDC’s Biosafety Level 3 laboratory, a highly secure airtight facility reserved for “indigenous or exotic agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation.”

In October 2005, Taubenberger and his team finally announced
that, after reconstructing Spanish influenza’s complete gene sequence, they had also successfully regrown the virus, a feat never before accomplished with an extinct disease. Mice exposed to the virus died within three days, and when it was injected into human lung tissue (in a Petri dish; nobody was actually infected), it rapidly destroyed the cells. Based on Taubenberger’s findings, some pathologists have theorized that the reason healthy people in their twenties and thirties succumbed to Spanish influenza at a higher rate than children and the elderly was precisely
because
these young men and women were strong and robust; their immune systems overreacted to the extremely aggressive virus, causing their lungs to flood with bodily fluids rich in white blood cells.

“It’s clear that the 1918 virus remains particularly lethal,” Taubenberger said after bringing about its Lazarus-like resurrection, “and determining whether pandemic influenza virus strains can emerge via different pathways will affect the scope and focus of surveillance and prevention efforts.” Deciphering how a specific virus operates opens up insights into other viral strains and reveals how they grow, mutate, jump from animal to animal, and attack their hosts. Research based on Lucy’s lung tissue has already led to improved flu vaccines that have prevented larger epidemics, and ideally, someday scientists will build on Hultin and Taubenberger’s work to uncover a genetic Achilles’ heel in one strain that will make it possible to wipe out all of them.

Here in Brevig Mission, the temperature has dipped noticeably and the sky is darkening. I check my watch and see that it’s almost 4:00
P.M.

I walk to the hangar and wave at Lisa, who’s already waiting and looks like she’s engrossed in her notes. I plunk down on the gravel and pull the “Lucy/Brevig Mission” file out of my backpack. While passing through Nome on my way here I stopped in the city’s lone historical museum to see what information it had regarding the pandemic’s impact on Alaska. A staff member kindly photocopied for me magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and personal correspondences describing how swiftly and unexpectedly Spanish flu had descended on this region.

“You had hardly gotten out of sight when the whole town came down with the epidemic,” a Nome banker named Levi Ashton wrote to his neighbor Joe (no last name is given) on February 9, 1919.

Ashton also mentioned several Alaskans who took their own lives rather than risk becoming infected.

I finish reading the six-page typewritten letter and just sit for a moment trying to figure out why Ashton felt compelled to write such a graphic and detailed account. Partly, I guess, there was the practical matter of sharing information with an old friend at a time when newspapers had been shut down and other forms of communication were limited. (Ashton refers to the letter itself as “this bulletin.”) With respect to the more explicit descriptions, there must be something cathartic about getting images like those out of one’s head and down on paper. It’s a coping mechanism, especially in the aftermath of such an immense tragedy. I also wonder if, maybe subconsciously, Ashton hoped that his letter would be passed down over the years—which, in the end, it was—as evidence of how horrific a disaster like this truly can be. Societies are forgetful, and with forgetting comes complacency. Ashton’s recollections are a warning to anyone who might question, at the outset of a potentially similar epidemic, whether all the government alerts and preventive measures are worth the time, expense, and effort. Yes, the letter says, emphatically. More so than we could ever imagine.

A faint buzz grows louder over the horizon, and from behind a bank of clouds a small plane bursts cinematically into view. Our ride is here. Lisa and I make small talk in the minute or so we have to wait before walking to the airstrip.

I ask her where she’s off to after Nome.

“Back to Seattle. And you?”

“South Carolina, to see the grave of a guy named Henry Laurens,” I tell Lisa right before the roar of propellers drowns out our conversation.

Laurens served as president of the Continental Congress in 1777, and was imprisoned by British troops in the Tower of London after being captured during a secret diplomatic mission to Europe. What especially interests me about Laurens, however, is not his life but his death, which marked the beginning of the most significant shift in burial practices in American history. And this posthumous angle is what’s determining which graves I’m visiting for the penultimate leg of
my journey. An extraordinary biography is not enough; any number of fascinating individuals lie buried and forgotten throughout the United States. For my purposes, each story, like Lucy’s here in Brevig Mission, must center on the corpse itself. Or, in the case of Henry Laurens, the lack thereof.