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A little more than 10 years ago, when neurobiologist Richard Smeyne was working at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, he saw a video of a duck acting strangely. The white-feathered, orange-billed bird was standing slightly apart from its flock on a farm in Laos. It walked in circles and flipped up a wing, then lost its balance and fell over. It got up, tried to flap both wings, and fell over again.
Smeyne saw the video while attending a seminar being given by then-postdoc David Boltz and Boltz’s advisor, a “flu hunter” named Robert Webster, who headed the influenza research program at the hospital. The duck, Boltz and Webster explained, was infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus that had sickened thousands of birds and killed hundreds of people in 2006 and 2007. Smeyne, who had been studying the neurobiology of Parkinson’s disease in ...
