Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

by Gina Kolata

And there the lung specimens from Private Vaughan and Private Downs remained, for nearly eighty years, secreted among pathology tissue from millions of people who died of diseases both common and rare, in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s archives. The archives had begun in the Civil War, created by an executive order by President Abraham Lincoln. Since then, military doctors had been sending in thousands of pathology specimens a year, with as many as 50,000 a year sent in more recently. The number of tissue samples stored in the warehouse had swelled to about 3 to 4 million. Several times in the past century, the warehouse specimens were moved as the ever-growing collection required more and more storage space. But the tiny paraffin cubes encasing lung cells from the autopsies of Roscoe Vaughan and James Downs remained in their boxes, of no interest to anyone until, at the end of the twentieth century, they were rediscovered by molecular biologists who thought it just might be possible to resurrect the flu virus from those ancient slices of lung.