Gradual Mutation

Read this story from today's Post for the history, and for the great reporting by David Brown that shows what an adventure and mystery scientific work can be. It's great stuff.

But here is the news:

The Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people around the world in slightly more than a year -- late winter 1918 into the spring of 1919. Researchers have never figured out what made the virus so lethal, in part because there were no samples to study. Although viruses had been discovered by 1918, the flu virus was not isolated until 1933.



With the genome of 13,600 nucleotides known and published in the journals Science and Nature, the 1918 virus is already shedding light on its own history. It was a bird virus that appears to have become a human virus through the slow accumulation of mutations, not through the sudden trading of genes with another flu strain.

It is also illuminating the possible future of viruses that are worrying flu experts now. Some of the H5N1 "bird flu" strains seen recently in 10 Asian countries carry a few of the mutations seen in the 1918 virus, suggesting that they, too, may be slowly adapting to human hosts.