Person of the Week: Jeffery Taubenberger

Oct. 7, 2005 — -- For the past 10 years, Jeffery Taubenberger -- a government scientist -- has been on a quest for one of the deadliest killers the world has ever known.

This week, amid growing fear of the bird flu in Asia, he announced that he had caught up with the killer.

"I have the same concerns and fears that every parent in the country would have about wanting to protect their children from all possible danger," the married father of two said.

Taubenberger resurrected the deadly flu of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people. Its victims were young and old, strong and weak.

"The long-term goal," he said, "would be to advance our understanding to the point where we could prevent a pandemic from happening again."

Taubenberger's interest in flu research happened almost by accident. Ten years ago, while taking a break from his lab work, he picked up a book about the pandemic in 1918.

"This was just a really horrific picture, and I could just imagine the suffering of those people," he said.

Frightened by what he read, he immediately went to work, trying to re-create the 1918 flu. But to do that, Taubenberger needed a sample and none had been saved. A year of research turned up nothing.

"We kept working, even though every single day we'd have negative results," he said.

Then Taubenberger searched a warehouse that stores millions of tissue samples from soldiers, dating as far back as the Civil War.

He came across two samples from men who, records show, died suddenly from poor health in 1918. Deep within their tissue, Taubenberger found the flu.

"I guess I'm a pretty reserved person," he said. "I don't recall jumping up or down or high-fiving or anything like that, but it was certainly a great sense of relief."

With the samples, Taubenberger slowly pieced together the deadly flu's genetic code. What he discovered was that much like the Asian flu today, the flu of 1918 began in birds.