SI.com Daily Cover: Into the Wild. Twice. For Mankind
The real most interesting man in the world? Consider Johan Hultin. Twice he adventured into the Alaskan wilderness to help crack the code of the infamous 1918 Spanish Flu.
His first try came 70 years ago, in 1950, when he was a 25-year-old student at Iowa. After a series of dangerous flights and a trip in a whaleboat made of walrus skin, Hultin made it to Brevig Mission. After winning over the head missionary and village council, Hultin got to work.
As detailed by Michael McKnight in Wednesday’s SI.com Daily Cover:
Gold miners had 33 years earlier buried Brevig’s flu victims using special ice-piercing equipment, but Hultin had sharp tools, too: his ingenuity and his endless capacity for work. Both came in handy when, three feet down, he hit permafrost, hard as a diamond. Thus began the slog: He built a driftwood fire at one end of the deepening rectangle he was digging and hacked at the softened earth there while a new fire warmed the rectangle’s other half. Back and forth he went, as long as 18 hours a day, while villagers watched from the rim of the sinking pit. On the fourth day, Hultin found a body—a girl with ribbons in her hair.
Ultimately, the trip failed to unlock the Spanish Flu’s secrets. A 72-year-old Hultin got another chance in 1997. This time, a pristine set of lungs from a girl they named Lucy contributed heavily to our understanding of COVID-19’s predecessor.
This current pandemic “will not end us,” Hultin says. “But there is always a risk that the virus will mutate. Nineteen-eighteen is an example. That [virus] was rather mild, but then it mutated and became terrible. If that virus showed up today, it would wipe out the civilized world. That’s not my opinion, that’s fact.”
