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

by Gina Kolata

Even today, with the exquisite advances of molecular biology and the pharmaceutical industry, viral diseases—and influenza in particular—are largely untreatable. It’s not that molecular biologists are ignorant about the inner workings of influenza viruses. They have known for decades that the simple influenza virus has only eight genes, each made of the material RNA, and that the viruses die in hours if left alone with no cells to infect. They know what the flu viruses look like—under an electron microscope, they are little balls or egg-shaped particles, although sometimes they form long filaments. They know how they are put together—flu virus particles are wrapped in a slippery fatty membrane, held in place by a protein scaffolding underneath. They know how the viruses burrow into a cell and burst out again by using hundreds of sharp protein shards that poke out of the virus’s membrane. They even know why human influenza viruses infect only cells of the lungs—those are the only human cells with an enzyme that the virus needs to split one of its proteins during the manufacturing of new virus particles. But what they do not know is how to make a medicine that is the equivalent of a penicillin for the flu. The best way to combat an influenza pandemic is with vaccines—if manufacturers have enough advance notice of a new flu strain to make enough vaccine to go around. Manufacturers could, if they understood what made the 1918 flu so deadly, stockpile vaccines sufficient to pro...