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SI.com Daily Cover: Into the Wild. Twice. For Mankind

Part Indiana Jones, part Anthony Fauci, Dr. Johan Hultin may be 95, but his work as an adventurer/pathologist — two times traversing the Alaskan wilderness to solve the riddle of the 1918 pandemic — is helping fight the coronavirus today.
Bill Huber|
SI.com Daily Cover: Into the Wild. Twice. For Mankind
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.”

FOR MORE ON HULTIN’S FASCINATING STORY, CLICK HERE.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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