The discovery of hantaan virus: comparative biology and serendipity in a world at war.

Several excellent reviews document the formal history of hantavirus disease and virology in Asia, Scandinavia, southern Europe, and the Americas [1–5]. I will not rehash or expand on this body of information; rather, I wish to relate personal experiences that played a largely unplanned role in the recovery of the prototype Hantaan virus from nature. I began my career in virology at the laboratory of Dr. Robert Chanock, in 1958. We worked on the cause(s) of acute respiratory diseases, including the common cold; with others, we soon identified many related viruses that induce that minor clinical syndrome. In 1962 I was asked to be the project officer for a large contract campaign to develop a vaccine for the common cold; instead, I fled the Bethesda, Maryland, campus, for a small field station maintained by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in the Panama Canal Zone. Soon I became involved in the study of an apparently new, frequently lethal, hemorrhagic disease in the northeastern frontier of Bolivia. At just this time, the tense Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. In its aftermath, President John Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, in return for the Soviet removal of the missiles with their atomic warheads. The US military was fearful that Che Guevara would lead a guerilla invasion into mainland South America and surmised (correctly) that his initial target would be Bolivia. When US Army officials in the Canal Zone learned of the new disease and of our efforts to work on it, they promised total support for a campaign to discover the etiologic agent and, if possible, to control the ongoing epidemic; they provided funds and airplanes to carry personnel and sup-