The Virus Buried in a 100-Year-Old Lung

Sometime in late 2018, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer descended into the basement of a Berlin medical history museum, a place so teeming with old medical specimens that each organ gets its own storage room. He headed for the lungs. Among the 400 or 500 jarred specimens that had accumulated over decades, he and his colleagues ended up finding one particular lung—preserved chemically in formalin—with clues to the origin of measles. The lung was from a girl who died of pneumonia after a measles infection in 1912.

Now more than a century after her death, the team led by Calvignac-Spencer, a virologist at the , has managed to sequence the measles virus in the girl’s lungs. It., 1,500 years earlier than estimated with previous genetic evidence. (A of the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, is available on bioRxiv.)