Jeffery Taubenberger

It had originally been established by a Civil War general as the Army Medical Museum in 1862 to combat “diseases of the battlefield”.

With Ann Reid, he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus which caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu.

He is Chief of the Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section, Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.

He eventually settled on finding remains of the flu virus, which caused the 1918 "Spanish flu".

The warehouse stored wax blocks from seventy-seven soldiers, who had died in the pandemic.

Taubenberger's team searched for samples of victims who had succumbed to the initial viral infection and not the subsequent bacterial pneumonia.

Seven samples seemed promising.

The genome of the flu virus includes about 13,000 base pairs, which had decayed into pieces as small as 100 base pairs.

In order to make PCR work, primers have to be constructed, i.e. a short bit of DNA with mirror sequences of the sequence at the two end points of the fragment.

They bind to the fragment, and with the help of a polymerase bases are added between the primers to make a copy.

The millions of copies of the gene segment are labelled with a radioactive probe as they are being made.

They can then be separated on a thin gel by running an electric current across the gel.

The radioactive labels create a black mark on an X-ray film which is put over the gel.

From serum tests of people who had witnessed the Spanish flu it was known that the virus had to belong to the H1N1 subtype.

The team looked at all available sequences of influenza genes of this subtype to find out whether there were any parts of a given gene which were virtually identical.

These were turned into primers.

Jeffery K. Taubenberger (born 1961 in Landstuhl, Germany) is an American virologist.

Taubenberger's laboratory studies a number of viruses, including influenza A viruses (IAVs), which are the pathogens that cause yearly flu epidemics and have caused periodic pandemics, such as the 1968 outbreak that killed an estimated one million people.

His research aims to inform public health strategies on several important aspects of flu: seasonal flu; avian flu, which circulates among birds and has infected humans in the past; swine flu, which circulates among pigs and has infected humans in the past; and pandemic flu, which can arise from numerous sources and spread quickly because humans have little to no immunity to it.

Taubenberger was born in Germany, the third son of an Army officer.

When he was nine he moved to a suburb of Washington, D.C., with his parents after his father was posted at the Pentagon.

In the late 1980s Kary Mullis had found a way to duplicate DNA strands by a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).

Using this method molecular biologist Amy Krafft eventually managed to isolate fragments of morbillivirus RNA.

Here, the team perfected the techniques to extract RNA by PCR from highly degraded tissue (If you set out with an anti-sense RNA strand – as is the case with influenza or morbilliviruses – you first have to copy it back into a sense DNA strand).

Fearing government cutbacks Taubenberger looked for an application of PCR to the immense warehouse of tissue samples at the AFIP.

He completed a combined M.D. (1986) and Ph.D. (1987) at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond in a course designed for students who wanted to follow a career in medical research.

For his thesis he studied how stem cells of the bone marrow differentiate into the mature cells of the white blood cell system.

In the winter of 1987 half the population of bottlenosed dolphins along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States died of a mysterious disease.

From samples taken from washed up dolphins a veterinary pathologist at the AFIP suspected a viral infection.

In 1988 he began a training to become a pathologist at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

In 1991 Albert Osterhaus managed to isolate a morbillivirus from dolphins who fell victim to a similar disease in the Mediterranean, but the samples from the first die-off were considered to be too degraded to isolate any viruses.

Nevertheless, Taubenberger was asked to give it a try.

In 1993 he was recruited to start a new lab at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in order to apply the then current molecular techniques to the Institute's pathology work.

After a year he was promoted to chief of the Division of Molecular Pathology.

This included a research lab, where he was free to pursue questions of basic science.

The AFIP was one of more than a dozen tenant facilities located on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the north-east of Washington, so its director reported to the Surgeon General of the Army and not to the commander at Walter Reed.

Before AFIP closed in 2011 as a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Act, the pathology division acted most of its time as a consultant, giving second opinions free of charge to the military and for a fee to civilian physicians.

It handled tens of thousands of cases yearly on the understanding that it may keep a representative sample from any case.

In this way it had collected tissue samples of some 2,600,000 people from surgical and autopsy material, mostly in the form of dice-sized pieces of tissue fixed in formalin and embedded in wax blocks of paraffin.

The AFIP also worked on veterinary diseases.