"It is absolutely certain another pandemic will come, but we don’t know what form it will be. The question is, How can we be forewarned?" Johan Hultin was 72, comfortably retired and happily married, when he decided to dig up the dead bodies again. The year was 1997. There was no pandemic; no urgent reason to fly to Alaska, hike into the wilderness and search for remnants of the deadliest virus the world had ever known. There was just a nagging thirst within the adventurer, and a few other curious pathologists, to learn at a molecular level why the 1918 flu had been so lethal.
—Johan Hultin, February 2002
Into the Wild. Twice. For Mankind
