this is wrong and this is not going help people. and this going send us in the wrong direction. so i'm almost always motivated by concern that it's important to get this downright.

>> i don't want to be like that for so many reasons. it's not good intellectually, it's not persuasive, you don't make -- you don't change minds. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. fred siegel, senior fellow at the manhattan institute, presents his thoughts on liberalism in the united states in "the revolt against the masses." in "the secondary wrap awakening and the battle for pluralism," the vice president for studies at the carnegie endowment for international peace presents a history of political change in the arab world. david kurtzer recounts the relationship between pope pius xi and best three toe mousse

lineny. in "hundred days: the campaign that ended world war i," nick lloyd recounts the allied push to end the stalemate on the western front in the summer of 1818. the executive foreign editor of the daily telegraph details winston churchill's military service this afghanistan in the 1890s in churchill's first war, young winston at war with the afghans. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors this the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> next on booktv, encore book notes. gina kolata sat down in 2000 to discuss her book about the devastating flu outbreak of 1918 that killed 40 million people worldwide. the author used letters, interviews and news reports to compile data for the book. this is about an hour.

c-span: gina kolata, author of "flu: the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918." why'd you write this? >> guest: i never really thought much about the flu. it just seemed like something that came around every year, and people would just get sick, and hen they get better again. i've never been interested in it at all. but then a few years ago -- i'm a reporter for "the new york times", and i wrote an article for the times about a really miraculous discovery. there was a guy at walter reed army medical center, and he was reporting in a technical journal called science magazine that he had somehow managed to get some lung tissue from a soldier who had died in 1918. and in that lung tissue there was still fragments of the virus that had killed him. and when i interviewed this man about his work, he told me about

the influenza pandemic of 1918. and i was stunned. i just had never seen, i'd never heard of anything like this. it was the worst infectious disease epidemic in recorded history. it killed so many people that if something like that came by today, it would kill more people than the top ten killers wrapped together. 1.5 million americans, many the if something with that mortality rate came by today. and i just found out by looking at some papers by the centers for disease control that 99% of the people that died in this epidemic were under age 65. so it was an astonishing, devastating epidemic. and what made it a story for me was this idea that all these years later, almost a century later, molecular biology had advanced to such a state and there was such incredible serendipity involved that somebody could actually have some lung tissue that still had those viral genes in there and ask the question what was this

virus? how could an influenza virus become such a killer? could it happen again, and if so, would you recognize it again? c-span: there's one reference in the book that maybe as many as 20-100 million people died world wild in 1918 from this flu? >> guest: they started ratcheting the number upward. people now think 40 million is an underestimate, and i heard most recently there was a meeting of historians and people who were interested in this flu in south africa, and they're saying they think the true number worldwide was closer to 100 million and possibly 20 million died on the indian subcontinent alone. c-span: what is influenza? >> guest: it's a simple little virus, and it only lives this human lungs. its only job is to take a lung cell and headache it into a virus factory. so the virus gets in. just like every other virus, it takes a cell's machinery and forces it to make new viruses,

and the cell dies, and the virus infects a new cell. c-span: what happens to the body then? >> guest: there are four hallmarks of influenza, i've heard. one is you get a fever and you take to to your bed. you have muscle aches and pains. let's see, there's four of them. muscle aches and indianas, fever, you have a cough. you don't always sneeze, but you have a cough. c-span: have you ever had it, by the way? >> guest: i think i had it once. c-span: so you don't though what it feels like? >> guest: it was so bad. it was five days of torture. i still remember those muscle aches, they were the worst. and the high fever. c-span: back in 1918 where did it start? >> guest: that's a really good question. the first time it came into the united states in a big way it showed up near boston. and people thought at the time this might be germ warfare because they couldn't believe it was something like the flu. many people insisted on putting the word influenza in quotation

marks. it was during world war i, and there were these rumors there had been this greasy cloud floating over boston harbor with these germs in it or that maybe the germans had put something into bayer aspirin to kill people. but when it arrived, it was the most horrible thing anybody had ever witnessed. they had so many young soldiers were dying, that they had of to have special trains to take away the dead. the bodies were stacked up like cordwood. and it was so shocking that the surgeon general sent a contingent of three of the leading doctors in the united states to go out and say what is going on at camp def vince? one of them later wrote his hem worry, and he said i can't even bear to think about this when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated the inferiority of human infections and the taking of human life. he said that these are memories burned on his brain that he would like to remove the he

possibly could. and when they describe what happened when these doctors wanted to see an autopsy, they said that there are so many dead in camp devins that they had to step over the bodies of the autopsy room. and when they watched an autopsy take place, the military doctor owned the chest of a young man who had died, and there were his lungs sodden and heavy in his body, filled with fluid, totally useless. the man had essentially died because his lungs had filled with fluid. and a doctor there who had been pretty much imperturbable, nothing could shake him, turned and said this must be something, this must be a plague. he could not believe it. c-span: in your book you have these, you have these -- well, you explain what there are, the bottom picture there. >> guest: the bottom be picture? these are some of the samples of lung tissue from people of 1918. what was this virus and how did we ever know, and what was really miraculous was there's a military warehouse.

people have described it as something like the library of congress of the dead. started by abraham lincoln. every time that a military doctor does an autopsy, he's supposed to put some of the tissue and the perp's medical records -- person's medical records in this big warehouse. there were people who died of that flu in 1918. and at the time doctors took little snippets of the lung tissue, soaked it in formaldehyde, wrapped them in paraffin and sent them to the warehouse. and a doctor at walter reed finally put in a requisition asking if he could find some lung tissue that had some viral genes in it. and that picture you just saw is of the little pieces of paraffin wax with the lung tissue in it, and inside that lung tissue after all these years there is still that flu virus of 1918. c-span: go back to this pathology institute out here at walter reed. have you been there? >> guest: yes, i have. c-span: there are three million,

what, samples? >> guest: yeah, they're in boxes and jars and things. and they're -- it's this big sort of core gated -- corrugated warehouse. i guess it's recollected from burping -- protected from burning down. and they have these big racks of box after box after box, and there's a man there, and his job is to when somebody says i think i'd like to get some lung samples, what was asked for in this case was people who died of influenza in 1918 and who died very, very quickly. because they didn't want the person that had gotten the flu virus and then lingered and, meanwhile, the virus that was left in their lungs had died. so, actually, the records since 1917 had been computerized. so he can get a computer printout of where to look. he goes over with his ladder and his hooks and takes down these boxes, and this them are samples. there's cancer tumors, brain tissue, all sorts of stuff in

that warehouse. and this was lung tissue. c-span: you said abraham lincoln started it. are there samples from the civil war? >> guest: yes, from then on. they've been steadily accumulating, sort of like a pack rat's paradise. and it was a brilliant idea, because when they started this, who would or know what you would use it for. and the idea in 1918 no one ever found the human influenza virus. so the idea that somebody someday could come back and make some use of this material was just brilliant. c-span: did -- and i know i'm jumping way ahead -- >> guest: okay. c-span: to they know what caused the influenza of 1918? >> guest: they know it was a flu virus. at this point they have three lung samples from people who died in 1918 who have those genes in them. getting them out is pushing the limits of molecular biology, and it takes a long time. they describe it as putting together a mosaic, a very detailed mosaic piece by piece to put those genes together.

they've gotten three of the eight genes completely put together nowment they chose them -- they're choosing them in order of the likelihood that think they they're going to get an easy answer to what made that virus so deadly. unfortunately, the first three genes have told them it's related to bird viruses and pig viruses, but they have not provided the answer yet to why it was dangerous. c-span: let me just ask you a couple questions about this pathology institute. there's only one person that works there? >> guest: one person that i saw, but i'm sure there's others. c-span: did you get any sense there's a lot of interest or traffic there? >> guest: no, no. i was the only person there. c-span: how big a fail is it? >> guest: it's pretty big. it was this huge warehouse. c-span: right out here at walter reed hospital? >> guest: right near it. c-span: i didn't expect to get out of this kind of a trauma. i mean, there are some -- drama. i mean, there are some personal stories in here that are pairly dramatic. were you surprised about the

competition going on to find this -- >> guest: by be the time i started to write the book, i knew there was a story. and i write books for myself. i read fiction for fun. and i like -- i wouldn't write a book unless i thought there was a story, because the if you just have chapter after chapter of a textbook, for me, it's not something i would pick up and read just because i wanted to read it. so that's what appealed to me, was that there was, there was a drama there. it was competition. it showed all of the strengths and weaknesses of the search for scientific data -- c-span: what book is this for you? >> guest: besides my -- well, it depends on whether you count noncommercial or commercial books. i guess commercial, fourth. c-span: how long have you worked for "the new york times"? >> guest: twelve years. c-span: how did you get to science? >> guest: oh, you don't even want to know, it's so silly. i wanted to be a writer, i really did.

but i was studying science, and i was changing graduate schools. i was studying mathematics. i was going to get a ph.d. and decided to get a master instead. so i just applied every place in the washington area because i was married then, and i couldn't move around so easily and tried to get a writing job. science gave me a job. it was not as a writer, it was selecting reviewers for manuscripts, and i said i'll take this job, but you have to understand i'm doing it to sort of worm my way into the writing d.. so i took the job and then shortly after i took it, i said, now, i'd like to write an article for you on my own time for free, take it or leave it. just, you know, do you mind the i do it? they said, okay, and they published it. then i did another and another and another, and that's how i did it. c-span: where's your hometown? >> baltimore. c-span: where'd you go to college? >> guest: i spent a year at mit before i decided that was not for me east.

so i tried science. c-span: and science magazine is bought by what kind of person? >> guest: it's actually mostly a subscription magazine and science and policymakers usually read it. but they have a new section that's supposed to be written for anybody to read. it can get kind of technical, but the idea is to write something so that a physicist doesn't have to know any of the stuff that led up to this discovery. it's just like writing a normal news story. all they have to do is read it, and they'll understand what's exciting. c-span: who owns it? >> guest: it's owned by the american association for the advancement of science, a nonprofit group. c-span: and you mentioned another magazine, nature. >> guest: it's like science's biggest competitor. very similar. has a news section, it has mostly scientific articles. c-span: go back to 1918 again. what was -- was this a more devastating new than the average one we hear about all the time

today? >> guest: there's no comparison. when you think about just the number of dead, i think i said earlier 1.5 million americans would die if something like this came by. in a typical flu season, 20,000 die and most of them are very old or have some other sort of chronic medical condition that weakens them. here 99% of them were under age 65. it was a very peculiar death curve. it was shaped like a w. the very young died and then people between the ages of 20 and 40 dies in huge numbers, that's the middle of the w, and then at the end old people died. c-span: you have, i'd like to ask you to read it if you don't mind, the author's brother, i guess, died of this. >> guest: yeah. c-span: and then thomas wolfe, where'd he write this? >> guest: he was writing "look homeward, angel." that's fiction, but i asked a number of people, and they the subscription of his -- description of his brother's death was not fictionalized. it was really what happened when his brother died of flu.

c-span: would you mind reading this in here, and tell us why you put it in the book. >> guest: okay. should i tell you why first? c-span: yeah. >> guest: okay. i think when i talk about the flu or when people who are living today talk about the flu, it's almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like. i tried as much as i could to put the words in of people who had been there, because when you've been there and seen is it, it has a sort of a, an emotion that we can't -- i can't capture, and i don't think anybody else that i've spoken to have been able to capture. so the reason i put the thomas wolfe description in was that of all the descriptions i had read about people dying of the flu, this one really touched he. it was -- it almost brought me to tears. it was the saddest thing. and you can imagine yourself in that a room watching somebody die like this. and it was one of those moments that, i mean, i can't forget this passage, and that's why i put be it in. wolfe came home to a death watch. his brother was lying in a sick

room upstairs while his family waited for what they feared was inevitable. wolfe went upstairs to the gray-shaded light of the room where ben lay. i'm sorry. and he saw in that moment a sering recognition that his beloved 26-year-old brother was dying. now here's the quote of how he died. ben's long, thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding. its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers in an attitude of struggle ask torture. it seemed not to belong to him. it was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal and the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray. out of this granite-tinted death lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black -- [inaudible] of a three-day beard was growing. the beard was somehow horrible. it recalled the corrupt vitality of hair which can grow from a rotting corporation and then thin lips were lifted in a

constant grimace of torture and strangulation above his white, somehow dead-looking teeth as inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs. and the sound of this gasping -- loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room ask orchestrating every minute this it -- gave to the scene its final note of horror. the next day ben grew delirious. by 4:00 it was apparent that death was near, wolfe wrote. ben had brief periods of consciousness, unconsciousness and delirium, but most of the time he wastily yous. his breathing was easier. he hummed snatches of popular songs, some old and forgotten, called up from the lost and secret attics of his childhood. but always he returned to this quiet humming, to a popular song of wartime. now tragically moving, a baby's prayer at twilight. and then ben sank into unconsciousness. his eyes were almost closed,

their gray flicker was dull, coated with a sheen of insensibility and death. he lay quietly upon his back, very straight, without sign of pain and with a curious, upturned thrust of his sharp, thin face, his mouth was firmly shut. wolfe stayed with ben that night fervently praying even though he did not believe in god or prayer. whoever you are, be good to ben tonight. show him the way. whoever you are, be good to ben tonight, show him the way. he lost count of the minutes, the hours. he heard only the feeble rattle of dying breath and his wild prayer. wolfe fell asleep then woke suddenly, calling his family with the certain knowledge the end was nigh. the body appeared to grow rigid before them. then in a last gasp, ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration. his gray eyes opened, filled with a terrible vision of all life in the one moment, he seemed to rise forward bodily

from his pillows without support, aflame, alight, aglory. and so, wolf wrote, ben passed as he had lived into shades of death. c-span: does he say in the book what his brother did? >> guest: i don't know. c-span: and you say i think another statistic that something like 25, 28% of the american people got flu that year? >> guest: that's right. it's kind of an amazing statistic because usually only a small percentage of people get the flu. so this was an amazingly infectious flu. it just spread throughout -- it spread so quickly throughout the population that people couldn't even understand how it was moving so fast. and then it was 25 times more deadly than normal flus and seemed to be killing the young people, which is why they had such an amazing death rate. c-span: here's a photograph from 1976 of president ford and his doctor giving him a shot. what's the story behind this?

>> guest: in 1976 scientists were really afraid the 1918 flu was coming back again. they had -- they had thought that the 1918 flu was related to a flu that also infected pigs at that time because around same time people were dying, pigs in huge numbers got influenza and started to die. it's not clear whether people gave it to pigs or pigs gave it to people, but scientists became convinced that the 1918 flu was related to a swine flu. in 1976 a young 18-year-old soldier or at fort dix went out on a march with his unit. he was feeling sick with the flu, but he really wanted to join them. he collapsed, was brought back to the hospital and died. he had swine flu, they finally discovered. and this was really strange. a young and healthy guy getting flu, a swine flu and dying. it's the very end of the flu season. it takes six months to make vaccine to protect the population, so president ford asked the host influential

doctors in the country, what should we do? do you say, well, let's wait until next season and see if there's a problem, or do you say this one death is scary enough that we ought to really try and protect everybody and get -- make a swine flu vaccine and give it out to the entire nation? the decision was, i think, understandable. they said we can't take a chance, because if we guess wrong and 1918 flu is back again, people are going to be dying rapidly. we'll have no way of protecting them. and so there was a decision to make an unprecedented campaign to immunize all americans against swine flu. it turned out that it was kind of a campaign that didn't work too well, and president ford in order to try to encourage people to get the vaccine was photographed getting his own flu shot. c-span: $135 million back then. >> guest: right. c-span: and it didn't turn out that it was that important. >> guest: it turned out that there was no swine flu epidemic. this guy got swine flu.

no one knows where he got it from. he didn't have -- it was totally unclear how he got it. a few other people seemed to have antibodies to a swine flu indicating they might have gotten one and recovered. but nobody died, except for him. nobody was getting sick from this flu. and so they had a vaccine against a flu strain that was not causing any sort of problem, and around the same time as everybody started getting imnewspaper niced, people started -- immunized, people started saying the vaccine is killing people, it's making them sick. so this was -- there's a lot of fear of that vaccine, and i think that's haunted people to this today because today you still here people say, oh, flu vaccines, they never get the right flu strain, and the vaccine is worse than the disease, and the vaccine can make you sick. and i think a lot of that got started after 1976. c-span: we're in the flu season as we record this going through february. how do they know, who determines, first of all, what shot you get, you know?

a couple months ago when people were offered -- >> guest: yeah. there's a group of experts, there's international surveillance that goes on all the time. and what they look at is they say what's the flu strain that's becoming the predominant one at the end of the previous year, and what flu strains are appearing elsewhere in the world. what happens is the flu -- what the flu does is every year it comes to a population, and it kind of burns itself out. the 1918 one did that too. and then it's -- who's exposed to it. and then it mutates. it changes itself a little bit, and it comes back again, and if the people are vulnerable to it, it will infect them. c-span: you say that a province right above hong kong in southern china, did all flus emanate from will? >> guest: well, there are some people who say that every major pan dem cantic that's swept around the world in this seven has begun this southern china.

there's a reason why they think this is sort of a hot spot for flus, and that is in order to really sweep the world, you have to get a flu that's so different from anything you've seen that virtually everybody in the world is us set bl to it. -- susceptible to it. and pigs can be infected be both bird flus and human flus, and they can be a mixing bowl that has bird characteristics and human characteristics -- c-span: by the way, how come pigs and not cows? >> guest: i don't know. can't answer that. c-span: but it's only pigs? >> guest: well, no, it's not only pigs, but pigs are -- i can't tell you that it's onlybe pigs. i wish i could, i don't know. c-span: if it's a heavy pig thing --

>> guest: yeah? c-span: do you kill the virus when you cook the pig? >> guest: yeah. the virus is dead. before you cook the pig, it's dead. you don't have to worry. it has to get into your lungs. you eat the pig, it's not going to get into your lungs. anyway, it's dead. so in southern china what they do, they have this very clever way of growing rice. they let loose ducks on their rice paddies, and the ducks only eat the weeds. and then when they harvest the rice, they put the ducks back among the rest of the farm animals, including the pigs. now, the pigs can now get the duck flu viruses, and the people that live very close to the pigs, the people can get the viruses from the pigs, so you can end up with a new flu that can spread from there around the world. and this is kind of interesting for 1918. it's not clear whether -- where the 1918 flu started, but there is at least one researcher in hong kong who is, has this idea that it's the 1918 flu started

earlier in southern china. he says he has historical records to indicate the that people in southern china were getting sick with something that looks like this flu, and the chinese laborers were sent to europe to dig the trenches. so he says it started every other major pandemic in this century. c-span: you say hong kong had a big scare, 1997. >> guest: they did. c-span: what was that? do we know about that here? >> guest: well, i knew about it, but i didn't pay a lot of attention to it because i thought scientists were overreacting. i no lock every thing that -- longer thing that. what had happened was there was a flu in hong kong that seemed to be killing young people. they were getting really sick, and they were dying. c-span: you mentioned one young -- >> guest: first, there was one young boy who died. he got sick, and he died, and it was very stage, because this doesn't normally happen, and there was a big investigation. it turned out that he had a bird flu, and that's really weird because bird flus don't normally infect people.

so immediately the alarm bells go off, is this going to start a pandemic? because scientists always have 1918 on their mind. when they -- it turned out, though, that nobody else except for this boy seemed to be getting the flu. his family members didn't seem to be getting it, nobody in his school. it was just a little kid. and no one knew, actually, where he got it. there was this big investigation, and no one knew exactly how he got that bird flu. none of the hospital workers, because he died this the hospital, seemed to have been exposed. so scientists said, okay, we don't know what it was, but luckily it's going nowhere. then a few months later young people started dying of a flu, and it turned out to be a bird flu. and that was really terrifying, because it looked like something was happening in hong kong. and ab international team of investigators along with very able investigators from hong kong did an extensive investigation, and what they discovered was it seemed there was a flu that was infecting chickens in hong kong, and it

was jumping from chickens to people, which is really unusual. and it was deadly, it could be deadly. it didn't seem to be spreading from earn to person, but it was -- person to person, but it was a flu that was even killing chickens, and they don't normally die of flu. so what the big fear was that if they leave -- if they don't do anything, that this flu would then infect the person, and the person would also get a human flu, and this their lungs the two flus would merge, and out would come a bird-type flu that could infect people, and we'd have 1918 all over again. in order to protect the world, the hong kong government ordered that every chicken in hong kong be killed, a huge number, over a million chickens. because in hong kong people like to buy chickens at a market where they're killed in front of your eyes. you buy live chickens to be killed. so they're called wet wok debts where all these chickens were in cages, and they were, every single chicken, killed. at the time i thought it was weird. now i think it was a good idea.

c-span: how do we get the flu? >> guest: we get it when somebody around us has it -- c-span: how do they get it? how does it start, the very first time somebody gets the flu, do they eat it? >> guest: no, they breathe it. they breathe it in, or they get the virus on their hand. it has to get into your lungs. and usually you breathe it. and the reason you tend to get it in the winter, they think is because you're inside more. and it also lives longer in the area when the air is dry. so we get it in our winter, this the southern hemisphere, they get it in their winter. c-span: so any way other than the flu shot to protect yourself from getting the flu right now? >> guest: well, you could barricade yourself somewhere. c-span: but you get it from the air. >> guest: you can stay away from people. mainly, you need a flu shot. c-span: so you think flu shots are a good idea. >> guest: i never had one until this year. when i wrote that book, i had

one, and i made my whole family get them. c-span: do you have children? >> guest: two children. c-span: how old are they? 18 and 21. i said i want you to get a flu shot, and i want you to call me and tell many me you got it. and then they called, mom, we got our flu shots tonight. c-span: your husband got his? >> guest: yes, he got his. c-span: what's he do, by the way? >> guest: he's a mathematician. he works for a nonprofit society. c-span: you don't live in philadelphia? >> guest: no, we live in princeton. c-span: back to this, when you had this idea, what year was it? to write this book? >> guest: 1998? c-span: and when you first called, did you call your agent, or did you -- >> guest: my agent called me. i have one of these really aggressive agents. c-span: who is it? >> guest: john brockman. he called me and said don't you think there's a book here in this flu stuff? i said i guess it might be really interesting. i didn't know the full story then, but i'd seen enough pieces doing some reporting for "the

new york times" that it made me think that there was actually a real story to tell, a story that would have a beginning, a middle and, i was hoping, an end so that you would be able to read it like i was hoping a novel and not just like reading a textbook. c-span: when did you really know that you had something unique? >> guest: when i got a. contrac. [laughter] they said they were going to publish it. c-span: what i mean by that, when you started to do your research -- >> guest: oh. when johan found the virus in alaska. that was when i realized there was truly a story here. because what had happened -- c-span: here's a picture of him in what year? >> guest: that was in 1950, i believe, or 1951 when he first went to alaska. c-span: and then there's a picture right above it, which is from where? >> guest: okay. there's one -- c-span: and then the -- >> guest: that's the same year. c-span: yeah, but where is that? >> guest: that's in alaska. below that, the he's in his

laboratory. c-span: and what is he digging up? >> guest: a mass grave where almost every eskimo adult in a tiny village had died of the flu, and they'd been buried all in the one grave. c-span: how many? >> guest: i think about 80. c-span: did the whole village go? >> guest: 90% of the adults. all the kids were left orphaned. c-span: in 1918. >> guest: that's right. sphwhrn and who is johan holden? >> guest: he's a pathologist. he came to this country as a medical student, and he just was going to study in iowa at the university of iowa for one year. and he came here, and he's a real adventurer, so he decided what he would do, he and his wife, before he started school he would travel to every state, every -- all 50 states. so they got a car, and they started driving around, and they ended up in alaska. and while he was in alaska, he met a paleontologist, and he and his wife spent the summer with this paleontologist sort of going around with him on his travels.

next year in medical school a visit l biologist said there was this terrible tragedy in 1918, and the only way we're ever going to know what happened is if somebody could just find somebody that was buried in the permafrost where the ground never thaws and their lungs are still frozen, and maybe we could get the virus out. johan said, well, i know how to do this. i know this paleontologist. i can find out where the eskimo villages were, i can get a map, i can find out where were their graves, and i could go up will and actually find a flu victim. so he, he did do this. it was sort of an amazing adventure. he's still just this young student. he went to alaska. he had three possible villages where he thought maybe he could find some bodies from the 1918 flu. it was like the three bears. the first one wasn't right, the next one wasn't right, the third village the mass grave was exactly right. he said there was a terrible tragedy in 1918, and i'd like

to, i'd like your permission to dig in this grave and to try to find some flu victims so that i can get that virus, we could make a vaccine, and you'll never have to suffer like this again. they told him that it was okay to do it. the story of how he did it is an adventure this itself, but he did manage to get some lung tissue, still frozen, from flu victims from 1918 and bring it back with him to iowa where he tried to grow it, and that's what that second picture of him in the lab was. todayst sort of horrifying to think that someone was trying to grow the 1918 virus, but he hadn't really thought very carefully about the consequences. he was growing it in chicken eggs which is to this day how they grow flu viruses, and he kept injecting them hoping to grow that virus, but nothing happened, so he concluded it was dead. but he never forgot that grave and the 1918 flu, and and he always swore that one day he would go back there when science advanced enough so that he could do something with that tissue. and he would try again to find,

solve the mystery of 1918 flu. c-span: so we've got the 1918 flu itself which killed a half million americans -- >> guest: right. c-span: and then you've got a 1952 trip by this scientist. >> guest: right. c-span: he is, from '51 to present, where is he located? >> guest: he's a pathologist in the san francisco area doing lots of other things, climbing all sorts of mountains around the world, still being an adventurer, but always thinking about this flu and always reading everything he could 5:00 molecular biology and wondering when the time be right to try to do something to find out about this virus. c-span: so we jump up to 1995. >> guest: right. c-span: and you mentioned jeffreyalenberger. is he a military man? >> guest: no, he's not. c-span: he's a civilian? and what's his background? is he a medical doctor? >> guest: he's both a medical doctor and also trained at a ph.d. scientist. he, he had just -- he sort of

just stump led into this kind of career. he's a brilliant man who always asks the right question, but he's an outsider to the flu field. and he got interested in influenza because his lab had been asked, one of the thinkings they do in the pathology lab there is they sort of answer questions for other people in the military. and one of the questions he'd been asked was why were dolphins dying. one of the military veterinarians said he thought the dolphins around the world were dying because they were infected with a measles-like virus, and he said if we give you the dolphin tissue, can you pull out a measles virus if it's there? so the lab got so good at doing this, they actually did pull out a measles-like virus, and he said i wonder what else we could do with our expertise, and that's what led him to start looking for the 1918 flu virus in the lung tissue. c-span: in 1995. >> guest: that's right. c-span: so he's got the big pathology institute with three million specimens --

>> guest: but he hadn't gone there before for anything. c-span: and you have johan holten who's out in san francisco, adult even know he's doing it. >> guest: that's right. and then he saw the article in science magazine where jeffrey said i have got this sample from the warehouse, i can start to pull out these jeeps. and holten wrote him a letter and said i think i could get you another sample, would you be interested? and he sort of carefully tried to explain who he was so he wouldn't think he was crazy, and doctor wrote back and said, well, yeah, of course, i'm really interested. and holten said, okay, i can't do it this week, but i can probably do it next week. the reason, he didn't want to say it at the time, he'd been working for 2025 years -- 25 years building a replica of a 14th century norwegian cabin and had just about finished it, and he wanted to fish it before he went -- finish it before he went to alaska. c-span: how old is he?

>> guest: he's in his 70s now. he was 71, i believe, when he went up there. c-span: and the doctor's how old? >> guest: i think about half his age. c-span: there's a picture missing from your book of kirstie duncan. >> guest: oh, right. c-span: why no picture? >> guest: you want to know the truth? c-span: sure. >> guest: okay. i wanted to put a picture, but she kept writing me letters that indicated she wanted to have some sort of control over what was said. c-span: does that track with, i mean -- >> guest: i think she was worried about, you know, she's worried about would everything be right, would it be the version she would want to be in there. but as a journalist, you can't let somebody control what's said this a book. i mean, i want to be absolutely accurate. i will check back forever. i will check anything. but i can't tell you that you can write it for me. c-span: well, tell us what she looks like. >> guest: oh, she's got waist-long hair. she's very tiny. c-span: how tall? >> guest: she's about 5 feet

tall. she's really little. c-span: how old is she? >> guest: i think she's about 30. so she's very young. she lives in windsor, ontario. i think she recently got married. she was living with her parents. i think she recently got married for the second time. sort of intense looking, very intense. very, very intense looking person. c-span: you've interviewed her. >> guest: yes. and she's very, very passionate. c-span: well, how did she get into -- c-span: i know you mentioned in the book university of windsor.

>> guest: that's where she was working. so she said i think i can find some bodies in the permafrost and get this virus. and my primary concern is safety. unlike holten who was just going to go up there by himself and not tell anybody. if he found nothing, he was never going to tell a soul because he didn't want the eskimos to become part of a media sir -- circus. she decided she wanted to make this something everybody would know about, and she could do this in the safest manner possible because she didn't want to unleash an 'em demick on the world. c-span: what year did -- >> guest: you'd think i'd remember all these years. i can't remember the exact year she started the search. c-span: but the article in science mag magazine came out when, do you remember? >> guest: i think it was '97. c-span: she had done it before or after? did she know about the article? >> guest: she didn't know about johan holten.

c-span: and this was some kind of a committee that dr.al men burger served on with her. >> guest: that's right. there was a big meeting, and they were saying, okay -- she had found what she felt were the bodies of seven minors on a tiny remote island near the arctic circle off of norway. c-span: how'd she find them? >> guest: well, it was sort of a coincidence. she learned that that was an area of permafrost, and then she started investigating to see if there might be any bodies there, and she found out about these seven minors who had journeyed off from norway to work in the winter, and they had gotten sick with the flu on the boat on the way over and died practically as soon as they arrived. she learned they were buried in marked graves, and she learned that -- and then she got permission from the government to dig into those graves and try to get the minorrers' -- miners' bodies. so she had to raise money. and she was raising money from governments, private industry. c-span: why is a canadian asking

the national institutes of health for money to do research? >> guest: because she put together an international team, and one of her team members was an american. he was an american vie rolings, so he was sort of the lead person trying to ask for money. c-span: how much money did she need? >> guest: i don't know. she got millions of, several million dollars. i think she got -- she at no time get a lot from the nih, something like a quarter million, but she got money from merck, from the british. she got a bunch of money. c-span: and all along it's already been discovered -- >> guest: well, it won't hurt to have more samples. it's not like there's anything wrong, but she didn't know about johan holten, and the doctor tried to tell her, he said, that they had three samples. first she said said the samples t from the warehouse didn't count because they were soaked in formaldehyde. he tried to say that hay had a frozen sample. and she doesn't think that she quite understood what he was

trying to tell her. but she wanted to go ahead anyway, and she did go ahead. c-span: i'm not sure of the timing on this because we haven't talked about it. johan holten went back -- >> guest: he went back to alaska, i'm sorry, and he did dig into that grave again, he did get a sample. he sent -- he divided it into four pieces. he put it in a preservative, sent it to the doctor. he sent it, being johan holten, everything is sort of done on the low tech scale. so he decided this was a really precious sample of lung tissue, and he didn't want to just trust the mail -- c-span: this is a picture of him here just a few years ago where he went back there. jumped from '51, he went back there because of the science magazine article. here he is -- >> guest: that's right. back in the grave site again getting another lung sample. he sent it back, he divided it into four pieces, one he sent ups, one federal express and i think the other one -- he actually used the mail, so he sent it in four different ways.

and they all got to the doctor. he found the viral genes in there and started working on them. meanwhile, kirstie duncan with her mull -- multimillion dollar, huge expedition went off to this island off the coast of norway with the media in tow and film crews and -- c-span: how much? did i read ten cameras there at one point? >> guest: i think there were ten camera crews there. there were all sorts of documentaries being made. and she -- it was a very, it was a big media extravaganza. c-span: anybody at all, and i shouldn't probably use this word, suspicious of what she was doing with all the media attention and the money involved? was there any controversy to what -- >> guest: well, there was a lot of controversy all along. people were -- scientists do get suspicious when there's a lot of media involvement. i'm part of the media, so i hate to say this, but they do get suspicious when something 150e78s blown up like that.

all the talk about safety, safety, safety started to seem like hype to a lot of people. so what happened was there was a lot of animosity, and there were a lot of people that were angry with her. and kirstie duncan is a very passionate, very emotional person. she dresses in a way that doesn't look like a scientist, waring high heels and spandex and stuff which i think also -- i hate to say it, but i think that made people think she wasn't a serious person. i think to her she was serious about trying to find this virus. i think she was genuinely moved by the stories, and i think she really hoped that she would be able to find the virus. c-span: so the doctor's on that committee with her. >> guest: he was. c-span: meantime, johan holten finds the body, gets the sample, sends it back -- >> guest: and he already had that sample when he was on the committee with her. holten had told -- he was saying we have another sample, we have another sample. but holten had told the eskimos that they were going to be the ones who determined when he made the announcement. he said he wasn't going to sort

of spring the media and all the world on them, that they could decide how to release this information. and so he was waiting for them to give him the go ahead to say he went up there, he'd gotten the samples, there was this mass grey. c-span: did he pay for this by himself? >> guest: yeah, he did. it cost him about $2,000. he went up there immediately. the next week he was up there with his pick axe sleeping on the floor of the one-room schoolhouse on an air mattress ready to dig this those graves. he got the permission of the eskimos, and in 1951 he did it all by himself. this time they gave him a couple teenagers to help him dig which helped him a lot. c-span: now go back to norway. >> guest: right. they had everything. c-span: how many people -- did you go to that spot? >> guest: i actually was on vacation when that happened. c-span: and what year? >> guest: i think it was, what was it, '98? one of my colleagues was there, john willford.

c-span: writes for the -- >> guest: everybody went. c-span: and they're all standing there as they -- >> guest: well, they couldn't get near the grave because what if there was a virus? they were all sort of herded off into the distance. they started to dig into this web site, and every day she would issue a press release. and what happened was it turned out the ground wasn't frozen. they had done e lab rot radar work ahead of time. we see the bodies, and it's going to be fine, and when they started to dig, they found out that the miners were buried above the permafrost this ground that was not frozen. so she said -- she issued a press release and said we have succeeded, we've gotten soft tissue. and people who were there told he that, actually, what she basically had was skeletons and that they took bone tissue, and can they also took some tissue there brain, but there was no lung there. and she -- c-span: you had to have lung tissue? >> guest: well, that's where the virus grows. it's unheard of for the virus to

grow in the brain. however, there's one strange thing about this virus, there are some people who thought, who thought that maybe the 1918 flu virus had sparked an epidemic of parkinson's disease. that's a degenerative brain disease where brain cells die. ask so -- and then you might say, well, how would you even know? well, there was an epidemic after 1918. in fact, when oliver -- [inaudible] books awakenings, they were the people who supposedly got it after 1918. and so, but still, if even's getting the flu and then everybody gets parkinson's disease, so what? why is there a cause and effect? there was one piece of information that was kind of interesting. in samoa there's one group of islands where we said no ships are going to dock here, and they escaped the flu. and another group of islands where ships docked and they got the flu, the people who didn't get the flu didn't get parkinson's disease. islands where they did get the flu, they didn't get the

epidemic. but nobody's ever heard of a flu virus getting into the brain. it's just not found in the brain. so as far as anybody's ever known or ever been able to show, a flu virus does not live outside the lungs. so if she did not get lung tissue, she should not be be able to get a flu virus period. c-span: so were there documentaries made? >> guest: yeah. c-span: and they couldn't show the actual -- >> guest: no, no, no. they showed the -- in fact, nova did a huge deal on this thing, but it turned out that the, because it didn't work so well, it turned out to also include a lot of the doctor's stuff too. in fact, they then made it into a documentary. they were there from the very beginning with kirstie duncan, from the very beginning when she started pulling her team together and saying let's discuss this possibility of going to norway, she had the cameras rolling. but when it didn't work so well, the documentary became a documentary about the race with the doctor and his group and

holten versus kirstie duncan with an international team of experts and millions of dollars and the whole world was watching. c-span: did you reach any conclusions about the way money was generated for this? >> guest: well, it was very interesting to me that the most exciting work on the flu was being done by the outsiders, holten and the doctor, who were doing it in a very quiet, low key way. and it was really interesting to me that you didn't need these elaborate, this elaborate and extensive apparatus to go dig into a grave site and ask whether you could get some frozen tissue. c-span: got to ask you one other little personal thing because you bring up john oxford in here and his marriage. what's the story, and who is he? >> guest: john oxford is a -- he's a british virologist, and he was a member of kirstie duncan's team.

and he began to exchange a lot of faxes with kirstie duncan that was sort of disturbing his daughter because they sounded, her faxes to him and her phone calls to him sounded so personal and so emotional. and also according to his, john ox ford's adult daughter esther, john oxford's wife was also getting a little bit concerned. when kirstie duncan's marriage broke up, the first person she called was john oxford. john oxford, by that time, had gotten her grants from the british for her -- and paved the way for a lot of her work. he had a falling out with her, and i think he's still a member of -- he is still a member of the team. but he no longer is -- whatever their relationship is, and as far as i know i have no reason to believe it's anything other than just letters, faxes, telephone calls, i don't believe it's anything else, but it's not what it used to be.

there's a sort of chill in their relationship. c-span: before i ask you about the center for disease can control, what is your conclusion up til now about what's going on with all of this? cowe, do we know -- was all this worth it? >> guest: yes, i think so. every time i speak to scientists about the 1918 flu i say are we going to see another flu like this, and they say, yes. you just don't know when because there's no way of predicting what's going to happen, how the flu virus is going to mutate. i think it's definitely important to try to understand how a flu virus can turn into such a killer. and if they can't find out by looking at all strains of this virus, at the very least they'll be able to do experiments that can say maybe it'll take a hundred changes to turn a flu virus into something, but maybe there's no one change, maybe there's hundreds of them. but they can say what does it do, what can you do to protect yourself, how do you stop this virus? c-span: okay.

what's different in 19 -- in the year 2000 than in 1918 if this kind of a pandemic were to start again. >> guest: okay. there's two big differences. one is vaccines. in 1918 there were novack seens. now, the big fear that everybody has is if they see a virus like this coming and they have the six months notice which they are expecting to have to make a zack seen that people will think scientists are just crying wolf and will not be vaccinated -- c-span: but they won't have a six months' notice for everybody though. >> guest: they're hoping to have -- well, no. c-span: it starts somewhere. >> guest: not everybody's going to get it. but if they can get vaccine going as fast as they can, you could protect most of the world from the virus. and sort of stop the pandemic from starting if people believe the scientists, they had to have a vaccine. the second big difference is antibiotics. a lot of people who died in 1918 died, of them died because of

the flu itself. but then others got very ill from the flu, and while they were sick bacteria came into their lungs, and they died of bacterial infections. and people still die of bacterial infections today when they get the flu. but we have antibiotics now, and we didn't have them then, and that'll make a huge difference in the death toll. c-span: nancy cox, who is she? >> guest: she heads the virology research at the cdc in atlanta. c-span: what's that. >> >> guest: this is the national center where they look at -- they're like the disease detectives. c-span: how big is it? >> guest: it's a campus-like thing with lots of big buildings. c-span: who funds it? >> guest: the federal government. c-span: a lot of money? >> guest: don't know, but i don't think it's enough. c-span: you think it should be more? >> guest: yeah. c-span: she got a call on this whole hong kong thing back in '9 3. when do you start to panic? stwhrg well, she started to panic as soon as she heard there

was a bird flu killing kids. i mean, she was really scared. she got a call when she was on her vacation in wyoming, and she was tossing and turning. she was of really worried. c-span: you say in the book she was awake many nights worrying about it. >> guest: that's right. she was. c-span: what do they wore airy about though? >> guest: they worry that you have to get at this thing fast, and you have to find out what is it, how is it spreading, how easily is it spreading, where is this virus, is it only in hong kong? is it elsewhere? what should you do? should you, should you ask for vaccines to be made? should you ask for another 1936 type thing to happen? c-span: is the cdc our front line defense? >> guest: it is. c-span: for all these kinds of things? >> guest: they are. they're the ones who look at aids, ebola, everything you worry about. c-span: and again, go back to the difference, in '18 what happened to the body? >> guest: well, people would very quickly, almost overnight