Special note from Desiree:
In my talk I stated that in 1997 the genetic remnants of the 1918 virus had been taken from the kidney tissues of Lucy, an obese Inuit lady victim... It actually were her lungs which Jefferey Taubenberger (Army Institute of Pathology) and his team removed from her body after having desecrated the permafrost graves of the 72 1918 flu victims of Brevig Mission, Alaska. This village counted only 8 survivors.

Johan Hultin was part of this 1997 team; it was his second visit. Already in 1951 he had succeeded in retrieving the virus in Brevig, but he lacked the necessary computer power to rebuild it then. It was when in 1997 supercomputers got installed at Fort Detrick (America's biowar lab founded by George W. Merck in 1942) that government agencies, scientists and pharmaceutical companies scrambled to get to Alaska and try again. This time they found 'Lucy', and with the help of the supercomputers Jeffery Taubenberger actually rebuilt the 1918 virus in 2003 and published its genetic sequence on the internet. (See also PBS documentary Killer Flu).
In October 2009 dr. Terence Tumpey (CDC, Influenza Division, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases) will publish his article "Resurrected Pandemic Influenza Viruses" in the Annual Review of Microbiology, 2009, Vol. 63