Can We Stop the Next Killer Flu?

As he works on the mystery, one thing is clear: This is a scientific drama that involves not only disease but also evolution, the process by which organisms mutate and adapt to changing conditions. And it's evolution in real time, at a frantic pace, happening as we speak, here at the start of the flu season. There is much debate these days about whether evolution explains life on Earth, but in the real world, on the ground, among living things, evolution is not only real -- it's dangerous.

A Long War

MAN VS. MICROBE IS AN OLD NARRATIVE. The plot's been twisting. A few decades ago, medical science sensed that it had the germs in full retreat. Antibiotics saved lives once lost to the most routine infections. It's hard to remember, but people used to die of strep throat, a small cut, a hacking cough gone bad. Vaccines turned the tide; germs stopped killing babies in their cribs; smallpox disappeared outright.

And then the tide turned back. Drug-resistant bacteria began flourishing. HIV became pandemic. Scientists began talking of "emerging" diseases. They come from the rain forest, from the dark recesses of tropical caves, from foul duck ponds and fetid chicken coops. They take advantage of a world of abundant human and animal meat. It would appear from the unfolding concern over avian flu, and from recent outbreaks of panic over other pathogens -- SARS, for example -- that civilization is increasingly vulnerable to pandemics, and that the human face of the future will be covered with a mask.

By overcrowding the planet, by ravaging our environment, by jetting promiscuously around the world with all manner of microbes in tow, by overprescribing antibiotics and helping breed superbugs, we've set ourselves up for a plague. That's the basic argument.

But here's another possibility: That we're at a turning point in the war between people and germs. That we've learned, just in the past half-century or so, how to read the code of life. That we've

developed techniques, just in the past two decades, to discern the complete genetic code of an organism. That, just in the last few years, we've started to figure out the innermost secrets of microbes and what turns some of them into pathogens.

Jeffrey Gordon, who studies intestinal bacteria at Washington University in St. Louis, says: "We have the tools in the year 2005 to define the genetic evolution of a lot of these pathogens, particularly in the case of viruses like flu. It's a race between our society, our politics, our societal will and the viruses."

No one knows how the race will turn out, but the advantage at the moment is not necessarily on the side of the microbes. We're on to their game. Or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, we're not a bunch of sitting ducks.

The Secret of Life

TAUBENBERGER BECAME INSPIRED in 1995 by a story of human eyeballs floating in a jar. They belonged to John Dalton, the pioneering chemist. Dalton died in 1844, but his eyeballs stuck around. He was colorblind, and he saw his defective vision as an experiment waiting to happen.

He hypothesized that a fluid in the eye (the vitreous humor) would, upon close examination, prove to be blue, filtering out the normal hues. He instructed his assistant to pluck out his eyes upon his death. After the great man died, the assistant examined one of the eyes and saw no blue fluid. He nicked the other one in the rear and looked through it -- literally looked at the world through John Dalton's eye. The world appeared normal. The colorblindness was thus neurological, a problem rooted in Dalton's brain.

In 1995, researchers reported that they had taken the Dalton case a step further. Genetic testing -- a relatively new analytical tool unthinkable in the day of Dalton -- showed that he had an inherited colorblindness gene.

Taubenberger loved that. How very cool, he thought, to solve an old mystery through some aging tissue sitting in someone's lab. "Everything about life is interesting, when you start to get into the details of how things work," he says. Taubenberger, the head of the molecular pathology department at his institute, wondered: What could I do that would be really nifty, but also of significance to the world? A mentor once told him, "Work on an important problem."