Johan Hultin, a pathologist who recovered human tissue still harboring the virus from the influenza pandemic of 1918 almost 80 years later, died on January 22 at the age of 97.
Johan Viking Hultin was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1924. His parents divorced when he was a child and his mother remarried a man who served on the Nobel committee that determined the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He came of age as World War II raged across Europe, stifling his opportunity to travel and see the world.
“The countries around us were occupied by the Germans, so I grew up confined to Sweden,” Hultin told Sports Illustrated in May 2020. Around age 20, as the war abated, “I took off," he said, walking on foot to see the pyramids of Giza, which he accomplished in just over two weeks, working in a ship’s engine ...
