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just because we can, doesn't mean we should

A famous picture from the 1918 flu pandemic shows so many rows of bedridden soldiers that it looks like an optical illusion — the double-mirror effect. It’s a jarring image to accompany jarring events that began in January 1918 and quickly subsumed the planet.

Little about the Spanish flu, which would ultimately infect one-third of all souls on Earth and kill a staggering 50 million, makes sense. Most influenza outbreaks pick off the weakest among us: the young, elderly, and infirm. But this one, called the “greatest medical holocaust in history,” targeted and killed healthy adults. Even today, “its origin remains puzzling,” said a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that called it “the mother of all pandemics.”

“Seventy-five years of research has failed to answer the most basic question about the 1918 pandemic: why was it so fatal,” the study said.

The unknowns of this flu virus and others have divided the scientific community. Some researchers think fatal strains should be re-created for analysis. Others think such an endeavor couldn’t be more dangerous. What if something goes wrong? What if an experiment accidentally unleashes a modern pandemic?

The defenders of such research parry: What if an epidemic happens naturally and we find ourselves unprepared?

At the center of the international debate is a thin, intense-looking man named Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who studies influenza virus and Ebola. On Wednesday, he and an international team of scientists published a study in Cell Host & Microbe that said they created a life-threatening virus that is only 3 percent different from the 1918 Spanish flu, which likely killed more people than the Black Death.

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