Autopsy of a Spanish Flu-infected lung from the USA’s National Museum of Health and Medicine. Circa 1914 to 1918. Source: CC BY 2.0.

Century-Old Swiss Lung Unlocks Spanish Flu Virus’s Secrets

In a dusty archive at the University of Zürich, a Swiss teenage victim’s preserved lung dating back to the 1918 Spanish Flu has spilled genetic secrets on one of history’s deadliest diseases. Swiss researchers (spearheaded by paleogeneticist Verena Schünemann at the University of Basel) managed to sequence the full genome of the 1918 flu virus