A chapter from “An Artist’s Story,” the life story Lee wrote in his eighties. In his words, as he wrote them.

When writing this life story I started out by telling you, when I was born in 1918 there was a great global influenza known as a pandemic it left 20 million dead throughout the world. Compare that number of deaths with the fact that when World War I was fought, between 1914 and 1918, it claimed 8.5 million casualties. In doing some research about that time in my life I found this picture of army recruits stricken with this influenza and they were housed in this gymnasium at Iowa State University. The US lost about 100,000 soldiers in World War I of those 43,000 died of the flu. I was looking into what made that flu so deadly and what can be done to keep similar strains from spreading. Now they are trying to reconstruct the gene of the virus from tissue samples preserved since 1918. New strains of influenza come from countries like China, the virus moves among pigs and birds kept close to their human owners. The influenza virus keeps appearing in different forms so a new vaccine has to be produced for each flu season. We have all experienced the times when the flu was a especially bad episode such as in 1918 when I was born, the Asian flu in 1957-58 and the Hong Kong flu in 1968-69.

One of the best examples of a high tech approach against the influenza virus is the way scientists can predict the right strain of flu vaccine just in time for the next flu season. This year the problem was to make enough vaccine because some people had to go without and some younger people had to wait until there was enough for them.

During my research I realized what a time of great anxiety my mother must have had, no wonder she kept me at home, thanks to her I’m still around.