Spinal Fire Scientia Est Potentia

November 20th 1918
Brevig Mission
Alaska's Seward Peninsula.

Eight survivors huddle against the elements fighting a chill no fire could warm. It may have started when the strangers came to town. It was always exciting when the postal dogsleds stopped on their way to Teller to supply for their journey. In such a small village any respite from the bitter arctic nights was welcome. Hands were shook, cheeks were kissed, and strong drink was shared to ward off the fury of the November winds. News from the “War to End all Wars” came by word of mouth and outdated newspapers. The carnage baffled the minds of the villagers who could not imagine such devastation on a grand scale. The world was at war and here they lay helpless yet safe in their little forgotten nook of the world. Little did they know that all the bullets in the war would claim less lives than the air they had just breathed with the strangers. The men left with their sleds ladened and the village set back to its ways. Five days later 72 people in the village of 80 lay dead on the frozen tundra. God had passed his judgment.

Even if they could muster the will, there was no way for the 8 bereaved survivors to bury 72 loved ones into an unwilling frozen earth. News reached the territorial government who eventually hired gold miners to drive steampoints into the permafrost, melting the earth on the village hillside where a mass grave was unearthed. A small cross was erected in monument to the plague which had nearly decimated the village.
***

Little did the survivors of Brevig know that the decision to bury rather than burn the bodies would preserve not just their loved ones, but also their invisible killer. The war ended and the people forgot about the viral holocaust which rivaled the Black Death in carnage. Perhaps it mattered little to the people of the world that the obituaries said Flu instead of casualty of war as a cause of death. Perhaps it was the sheer speed with which the disease ripped through humanity like a match on a pile of dry leaves. The angel of History by and large forgot about the plague. Dead was dead and the horrors humanity had endured at God and man’s hand were best left forgotten. It would seem World War I and the Spanish Flu of 1918 gave humanities collective unconscious a case of post traumatic stress.

The years passed and the war to end all wars… didn’t. In a tale that reads stranger than fiction the 1918 Spanish Flu slept in it’s frozen tomb waiting the eager axe of a young scientist. In 1951 Patholigist Johan Hulten on a macabre treasure hunt not unlike an Egyptologist broke ground in the village. Little did he know that unlike the mummy’s curse…this one was very real. Building fires to melt the ground he would dig until hitting frost again and repeat the process until he found his prize; one of the 82 victims of the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Hulten exhumed a corpse and removed a sample of lung tissue which he triumphantly brought home to his lab in Iowa City. To his disappointment try as he might he could not reconstitute the virus. Disappointed he went on with his life and became enthralled in biological warfare, eventually creating a lab to study weaponizied organisms such as anthrax.

46 years later Hultin, age of 72, was home thumbing through the latest issue of the journal Science when he happened upon an advertisement that would change the course of the world. Another Scientist was attempting what he had so many years ago. This scientist was looking for samples to compare with those he had retrieved off of two WWI fallen soldiers. Hulten was invigorated. He traveled back to Alaska and once again exhumed a corpse, this time selecting a more obese subject, as the fat would have helped insulate the lungs tissue which held the unholy grail. Hultin shipped the samples to Washington DC directly into the waiting arms of the government.

The Scientist who received the samples was Jeffery K. Taubenberger, a third generation Army brat turned research scientist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology located on the Campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Walter Reed was created to provide care to soldiers free of charge with one condition; they get to keep samples for scientific research. Fearing army cutbacks Taubenberger, who had been free for years to simply “pursue questions of basic science,” Felt compelled to create something useful; a dangerous urge in a pathologist. Sifting through the approximately 2,600,000 archived wax paraffin entombed autopsy and surgery samples he stumbled upon the tissue which once belonged to army private Roscoe Vaughn who had died on September 26th 1918 at Camp Jackson, South Carolina.. The cytokine storm brought on by the Spanish Flu had rendered his immune system incapable of fighting off the Pneumonia he contracted in hospital. In a move reminiscent of Jurassic Park, Taubenberger used up all the remaining tissue of Roscoe’s Sample in an attempt to sequence the genome of the deadly virus. That was what impelled him to place his add in the journal. It was either the providence of God or the synchronicity of the unbeliever that brought the two scientists together. With the help of the dead of the village of Brevig Mission the code was broke and the curse was once more released up on humanity who was much like a child with a hand grenade.

Like Prometheus giving fire to the humans or Oppenheimer unlocking the secrets of the Atom the Spanish flu at the height of its deadly efficacy was now in the hands of the US based Military Industrial Complex and its eugenicist masters.

The 1918 Spanish Flu claimed an estimated 3-7 the times victims of World War I, killing an estimate 50 million people or about 3% of the worlds population. The virus killed more people than both World Wars, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and both Iraq Wars in less than a year. It killed in under a day. People woke up, had their morning coffee and were dead before sunset.

This virus did in under a year what the Masters of War couldn’t do in a century… and it is now in their hands.

Is there any wonder that we are currently in the depths of a flu panic with similar traits 12 years after curiosity led us to reconstitute the virus? Has humanity learned so little from the cautionary tale of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster?

Sources:

BBC News (2007) “Lethal secrets of 1918 flu virus” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6271833.stm)

Fernandez, Elizabeth (2002) “The Virus detective: Dr. John Hultin has found evidence of the 1918 flu epidemic that had eluded experts for decades” (San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 2002, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/0...)

Gregor M.D., Michael (2006-2008) Bird Flu: A Virus Of Our Own Hatching. (http://birdflubook.com).

Rozell, Ned (2005) “Villager's remains lead to 1918 flu breakthrough.”
(http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF17/1772.html)