Shope, with his upbringing on Iowa farms and his familiarity with pig diseases, was intrigued. He read Koen’s papers and could not dismiss the connection between swine flu and the human pandemic. Could it be, he wondered, that the long-lost 1918 flu organism was still extant, living on in pigs who had acquired the disease from people? If so, Shope and Lewis reasoned, if they focused on the new swine flu epidemic, they had a perfect opportunity to figure out what was causing the swine—and the human—disease.
