On Oct. 7, 2005, Jeffery Taubenberger, AH Reid, AE Krafft, Karen Bijwaard and Thomas Fanning published a report in Science that described the isolation of the genes from the deadly 1918 flu virus.

RNA from a victim of the 1918 pandemic was isolated from a formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded, lung tissue sample. Nine fragments of viral RNA were sequenced from the coding regions of hemagglutinin, neuraminidase, nucleoprotein, matrix protein 1, and matrix protein 2.

The sequences were consistent with a novel H1N1 influenza A virus that belongs to the subgroup of strains that infect humans and swine, not the avian subgroup.