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

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is the author of Nations Are Built of Babies:
Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

Working closely with a group of 17 scientists and professional
exhumation specialists from Canada, Britain, Norway, and the United
States, medical geographer Kirsty Duncan co-ordinated a
multidisciplinary, multinational research project focused on finding the
cause of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19. Three “waves” of the
flu killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide in a single year,
often “with spectacular speed and horror”—a toll far surpassing
the probably underestimated casualty totals of the “war to end all
wars” (12 to 20 million). Despite advances in medical technology and
in virology, the flu’s cause continues to elude researchers.

In 1992, Duncan, at that time on faculty at the University of Windsor,
began to search for victims who had been buried in permafrost. With the
discovery of the bodies of seven young coal miners who had succumbed in
1918 and were buried on Spitsbergen Island, in Svalbard, Norway,
undisturbed for 80 years, a particularly promising source for the
investigation was located.

But more than an account of the intriguing “inside” story of the
nine-year Scientific Advisory Group project that she directed, Duncan
aims to give us a glimpse of “science in all its complexity,” in
both its inspiring and its darker aspects, the latter encompassing
“the sometimes unseemly ethics and practices of science,” including
“covert funding” and “publication wars.” Needless to say, this
is an enormous task, especially as she also wants to consider the
embedded power relations that centre on age and gender. As a young
woman, Duncan’s leading role exposed her to a considerable amount of
discrimination, and one of the book’s foremost concerns is this
entrenchment of male seniority within scientific communities and its
consequences for scientific research, discovery, and leadership.

Despite her travails with the older, mostly male research team, some of
which one might suspect had more to do with clashing egos than with age
or sex discrimination, the project itself was a fascinating undertaking.
The miners’ bodies were not buried as deeply in the permafrost as had
been hoped, and the tissue samples were consequently ruined. In the
meantime, American scientists working independently of the Duncan team
successfully sequenced RNA from the virus in lung tissue from military
personnel who had also perished in the pandemic. With the addition of
some well-preserved lung tissue from bodies buried in Alaska, which were
discovered as early as 1951, much of the RNA sequence for the 1918 flu
could be established. Duncan appears somewhat ungracious about the
success of her project, although her dismay, after six years of
intensive, expensive, and much-publicized work, is understandable. Her
depiction of what happened—in all aspects—makes for compelling
reading regardless of which “side” is seen to finally win.