SCIENCE BRIEFING
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From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Researchers have discovered what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly -- a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia.
Scientists painstakingly substituted single genes from the 1918 virus into modern flu viruses and found that a complex of three genes helped to make the virus live and reproduce deep in the lungs, according to a study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The three genes -- called PA, PB1, and PB2 -- along with a 1918 version of the nucleoprotein gene made modern seasonal flu kill ferrets in much the same way as the 1918 flu killed 50 million people worldwide, the researchers found.
