Death in a cold climate
Tony Gould
HUNTING THE 1918 FLU: ONE SCIENTIST'S SEARCH FOR A KILLER VIRUS by Kirsty Duncan University of Toronto Press, £22, pp. 297, ISBN 0802087485 Kirsty Duncan is a Canadian and a medical geographer. It was her dream to recover viral fragments from the bodies of Spanish flu victims buried within the Arctic Circle, where the permafrost would preserve them. After years of preparation and searching for the ideal spot in Alaska, Russia or Norway, she settled for the island of Spitsbergen in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, where seven coal miners known to have died of the disease were buried, She got together a team of eminent scientists from several countries, but by 1998, when the bodies of six of the miners (the family of the seventh did not want his body disturbed) were finally exhumed, the high-profile undertaking had run into a number of difficulties.
The two most important were the defection of one team member from the United States, Jeffrey Taubenberger, who stole a march on his colleagues by acquiring tissue samples elsewhere, and the discovery that the Norwegian bodies, which ground-penetrating radar studies the previous year had suggested were interred well below the permafrost level, were in fact buried above that level.
Taubenberger struck lucky when a Swedish-American pathologist, Johan Hultin, who had been part of a similar project undertaken in Alaska in 1951 offered to return there at his own expense (and in his seventies) to acquire samples to enable Taubenberger independently to pursue the work of genetic sequencing he'd begun with archival material housed in the American Forces Institute of Pathology. The Canadian members of Duncan's team were dumbfounded by Taubenberger's duplicity: 'Peter [Lewin], always the gentleman, simply said, "I am surprised that that nice young man would work behind our backs like that."' Hultin's successful completion of his mission cast into doubt the whole purpose of Duncan's scientific expedition: what would the Norwegian material add to what the soon to be excommunicated Taubenberger had already obtained from Alaska?
But if the Norwegian bodies should turn Out to be perfectly preserved there was still a chance of acquiring live virus, which would certainly provide a scientific breakthrough. This was what the virologists hoped for, but Duncan stubbornly insisted it wasn't, and never had been, the purpose of the expedition (though she never makes it clear why she objected). By this time, relations between individuals — and nations — had deteriorated to the point of no return. Duncan's particular bete noire is the British professor John Oxford, who negotiated a large part of the funding with the pharmaceutical company Roche and, in Duncan's view, used the power this gave him to sideline her and hijack her project. Oxford's view, incautiously but forcefully expressed, was that she was 'a megalomaniac and a control freak'. Then, when the miners' graves were found to be too shallow for the bodies to have been perfectly preserved, Oxford further infuriated Duncan by speaking out of turn and openly expressing his disappointment to the attendant media circus.
This is not to suggest that all right was on one side. Duncan undoubtedly has a point when she claims that she was a victim of prejudice because she was young, female and 'a non-scientist, in the virologists' eyes' (hence, presumably, her assertive use of the word 'scientist' in the book's subtitle). The British scientists, particularly Sir John Skehel, director of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, do seem to have been dog-inthe-manger in the way they refused to share their precious samples with the other countries' scientists — on the technicality that their laboratories were not secure enough to handle live virus, when the chances of there being live virus in any of the samples were virtually nil. There is also truth in Duncan's assertion that 'rivalry, covert funding practices, publication wars, and unethical practices do exist in scientific work', though finding this surprising reveals her own naivety. On the evidence of her exhaustive — and exhausting — account Duncan must have been a nightmare to deal with, always insisting on the letter of the law, her own rectitude and her rights as 'project leader'. But there is something indomitable about her and her refusal to accept that she was beaten. She could be brave, too, as when she bearded her British adversaries in their own den, at the London conference they'd called to publicise their findings — to which she'd conspicuously not been invited and made them acknowledge not just her part in the expedition, but that of the Norwegians as well. However, her appearance there exposed her to the ultimate put-down from Sir John Skehel:
At this point Sir John interrupted the conversation. He casually asked. 'Are you here on vacation? Seven years of my work being exposed to all and sundry, and Sir John asked if I were 'here on vacation! I did not answer and he walked away. These were the only words that he spoke to me throughout the conference.
Perfidious Albion indeed. Duncan's book, impassioned though it is, is not an easy read. She attempts to tell the story in an objective, academic way, but subjectivity keeps breaking through and it ends up being neither one thing nor the other, Pete Davies provided a more readable, though not necessarily a more accurate, account of these events in his book Catching Cold (reviewed in these pages on 14 August 1999).
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