Resurrecting 1918 Flu Virus Took Many Turns

The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. In one, a river had changed course, disturbing the permafrost. In another, a beach had eroded, exposing the grave. But the third, a place called Teller Mission, looked good.

Seventy-two of 80 residents of Teller Mission died between Nov. 15 and 20, 1918. The Army buried the victims with a steam-powered excavator used by miners.

Hultin went to the village, whose name has since been changed to Brevig Mission, and requested permission to excavate the grave. Through a translator, he emphasized the benefit of making a vaccine. The villagers had been vaccinated against smallpox, so they knew what he was talking about. And at the meeting were three of the eight survivors from 1918.

"They told us their terrible story about all the other people in the village dying. That convinced the rest of them to let me help," Hultin recalled recently.

On June 25, 1951, he, two Iowa professors and the paleontologist went to work. They dug through three feet of tundra and gravel, and then three feet of permafrost. They wore masks. There were no observers or reporters. They sampled four bodies; all had evidence of pulmonary hemorrhage, the hallmark of rapid death from influenza alone. They took blocks of tissue from various organs and quickly put them into steel containers that were then sealed in steel boxes.

"Preserving the specimens and getting them safely and quickly to their medical laboratories in Iowa City was now the problem," wrote a Washington Post reporter three months later in a brief account.

"A wild storm whipped the bay to waves of almost impassable heights. Dry ice, brought from the States to refrigerate the specimens, had evaporated . . . In the emergency, the scientists used a fire extinguisher whose foamy carbon dioxide contents, spurting from its nozzle, formed dry ice. With native help, the expedition members detoured the hazardous bay crossing, made their way overland to a narrow strip of the bay, and got back to the town of Teller," wrote the reporter, N.S. Haseltine.

Back in Iowa, Hultin thawed the tissue and tried to recover the virus. He exposed ferrets -- the species whose response to influenza is most like people's -- to tissue extracts. The animals did not get sick. None of his experiments succeeded. He concluded there was no live virus in the Inuit corpses.

Hultin believes he could have gotten a doctoral dissertation out of this meticulous but failed effort. But he never got around to writing it. Soon after his many months of experiments had proved fruitless, he was invited to enter medical school at the University of Iowa. He accepted the offer, became a pathologist and spent much of his career at a hospital in California. Now retired, he turned 81 on Friday.

No scientific publications came out of Hultin's project. But it was not entirely lost to history. A historian named Alfred Crosby mentioned it briefly in his 1989 book, "America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918."

As it happened, Hultin was not the only person who attempted to get the Spanish flu virus out of the ice. The same year he tried, U.S. Army researchers did also. They excavated a mass grave near Nome, Alaska, finding only skeletons. Hultin had been there three weeks earlier and had rejected the site.

Four decades later, however, the Army returned to the story.