American scientists have recreated the influenza virus that killed at least 50 million people in 1918. By painstakingly piecing together viral fragments from hospital specimens and a victim buried in Alaskan permafrost, Jeff Taubenberger and colleagues at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, have now sequenced all eight coding regions of the 1918 flu virus's genome. They say the need to understand how flu viruses cause lethal pandemics outweighs any safety risks. Do you agree?
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