dead lungs from past pandemics
In 1951, a forensic pathologist named Johan Hultin had gone looking for the same thing. As a graduate student, he traveled to the Alaskan village of Brevig Mission, where 72 of its 80 adults had died of influenza around the same time the Army private’s lungs filled with fluid. Hoping that the virus might still be alive in the permafrost, a layer of soil that stays frozen year-round, Hultin dug around in a mass grave and collected five samples from corpses that the cold had kept perfectly preserved. But the dry ice he had brought to preserve his collection evaporated before he could return. None of the samples were viable.
Taubenberger and Hultin were both attempting to piece together the origins of the Spanish flu, which, decades after the virus had ravaged the world, still weren’t clear. (Ironically, one thing that was clear was that it didn’t actually originate in Spain: since Spain was neutral during WWI, its newspapers reported the plague more freely than other countries’, leading to an overestimation of its severity there.) Taubenberger and Hultin both knew that discovering more about previous epidemics would help us deal with them in the future. As a notable geneticist told the New York Times at the time of Taubenberger’s discovery, “the sooner we can learn what to anticipate, the more likely we will be able to blunt the next appearance.”
Last February, weeks before life in the US ground to a halt, Taubenberger co-authored a perspectives article for The New England Journal of Medicine that warned of the threat of the then-novel coronavirus, COVID-19. The authors warned that “If public health efforts cannot control viral spread, we will soon be witnessing the birth of a fatal global pandemic,” adding,
We must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats.
Over a year later, with 600,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, cases in the US have fallen enough for life to resume. Though some distancing restrictions remain, the pandemic feels effectively over. However, in places like India and Brazil, where Modi and Bolsonaro, respectively, have disastrously downplayed the virus, it remains a serious problem. Even in the US, there are lingering fears that low vaccination rates in the South could lead to a surge.
In the North, in New York City, the past is a dark compartment of forgetting and the present is hot and pungent and clouded with pollen and exhaust. There is much talk of reopening and returning to normal, and many awkward and ecstatic attempts at doing so. It’s an illusion, of course, that we’re going back to anything instead of barreling into the future—pollen season, for instance, continues to lengthen as the world warms—but we could be forgiven for not wanting to dwell on the past year.1 We know, I think, that the past can always come raging back, that it’s never quite gone, but we have lived in a world of dread for a long time. We’ll take the summer, at least, to pretend to forget. Or I will: last weekend I went to a crowded beach to lie around with friends and let my thoughts fill up with rum and hot sand.
In the summer of 1997, Hultin, then 72 years old, read about Taubenberger’s work and contacted him, offering to return to Brevig Mission to search for more samples. With Taubenberger’s encouragement, Hultin self-financed an expedition to excavate the same mass grave he had dug into 46 years before. On his fourth day of digging, he discovered the remains of a young Inuit woman, whom he called Lucy. Her lungs had been extremely well-preserved in the permafrost; Hultin put them in jars and shipped them to Taubenberger, who was able to isolate viral material for study. “Her lungs were magnificent,” he later recounted, “full of blood.”
As rising temperatures approach 3º Celsius, 30 to 85 percent of top permafrost layers are expected to melt. What’s left of “Lucy,” as well as remains far more ancient than hers, will begin to decompose, and carbon dioxide and methane that have been trapped for millennia will be released. Yesterday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a CO2 average of 419.13 ppm for the month of May. The last time it was around 400ppm was during the Pliocene Epoch, 4.5 million years ago, when forests grew on present-day tundra, and seas were five stories higher than they are today.
At the Far Rockaways last weekend, everything glistened and burned in the sun. I wandered through the haze, my feet in the freezing tidepools and my head in the pulsing heat, threading through tents and towels of revelry and torpor. I felt loose, expectant, almost terrified, entirely out of time, as if something had been sped up or skipped over or forgotten, and I didn’t know what to do with the feeling, aside from chalk it up to drunkenness and heat.
Five stories or more above me, small planes dragged large banners printed with advertisements across the sky. I imagine them gliding over a Pliocene sea, wheels almost skimming the surface, nothing alive beneath them that might read their messages. Just steel towers in the distance jutting out from the waves.
Yesterday, researchers announced that they had successfully revived a rotifer that had stayed alive in Siberian permafrost for 24,000 years.
ben tapeworm