It had originally been established by a Civil War general as the Army Medical Museum in 1862 to combat “diseases of the battlefield”.
In the winter of 1987 half the population of bottlenosed dolphins along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States died of a mysterious disease.
In the late 1980s Kary Mullis had found a way to duplicate DNA strands by a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).
Using this method molecular biologist Amy Krafft eventually managed to isolate fragments of morbillivirus RNA.
Fearing government cutbacks Taubenberger looked for an application of PCR to the immense warehouse of tissue samples at the AFIP.
Taubenberger's team searched for samples of victims who had succumbed to the initial viral infection and not the subsequent bacterial pneumonia.
That success led Reid to test more cases from 1918, with an eventual positive signal from tissue belonging to an army private named Roscoe Vaughan, who had died on 26 September 1918 at Camp Jackson, South Carolina from a pneumonia of the left lung.
They decided to send their first publication to Nature, but the editors rejected the paper without even mailing it to experts for peer review.
(In September 1997 tissue from a private called James Downs, who succumbed to influenza at Camp Upton, New York, turned out positive as well.)
Again he received permission to dig for victims of the 1918 Spanish flu, and this time he unearthed the remains of an obese woman, maybe thirty years old, whom he christened “Lucy”.
Dr. Stephen Carter had discovered Taubenberger's work through the paper in Science, and he wanted to know whether Taubenberger would be interested in reading the first draft of a novel in which an ambitious vaccine biotechnology company known as Immunological Technologies resurrects the 1918 Spanish flu virus in secrecy in its state-of-the-art facility in San Diego, California.
Taubenberger thought that there were unresolved plot lines involving the naval carrier task force that played a central role in the escalating international conflicts in the book, later published as Ninth Day Of Creation.
Carter relented and added a new section to the book involving a battle scene between a U.S. naval aircraft carrier and an advanced Chinese nuclear attack submarine.
Jeffery Karl Taubenberger was born in the US Army hospital in Landstuhl but to a German father and US-born mother.
His father Heinz Karl Taubenberger was a well-known figure skater in his youth, and was Germany's junior champion several times both in pair-skating and men's singles in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In his free time Taubenberger is a woodwind player – oboe, English horn, clarinet; but his interest has mainly been composition.
In 1984 he wrote a "Symphony in D minor", from which he performed two movements with the Richmond Community Orchestra in the same year with Taubenberger conducting.
Next came eight two-part inventions for solo piano (1994), a string quartet in E minor (1997), and "Daydreams", a symphonic tone poem for large orchestra (2000).