The suggestion went unremarked.

From Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata.  Page 87. An example of the role of contingency and serendipity in discovery.

On that fateful day in 1950, Hultin woke up early, as was his habit, in the small room in Iowa City that he and his wife, Gunvor, were renting. After breakfast, he set off immediately to work on his influenza project in a lab at the university. The lab was a large room filled with graduate students, each at his or her bench, each conducting experiments that would form the basis for a postgraduate degree. Every now and then, eminent microbiologists would pass through town and would be ushered into the lab to see the busy students at work. That morning, as Hultin looked up from his lab bench, he noticed that the head of the microbiology department, Roger Porter, was escorting William Hale, a well-known virologist from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Porter would stop at each student’s bench and tell Hale what the student was doing. When he came to a student whose work was particularly interesting, Porter would pause and explain the work more fully.

When the men came to Hultin’s lab bench. Hultin recalls, Porter said simply, “Here’s Johan Hultin. He’s from Sweden and he’s working on the influenza virus.” Then they moved on.

A few minutes later, however, Porter brought Hale back to Hultin’s bench, remarking, “Bill, you’ve got to see what this fellow Hultin here has made.” It was a jury-rigged device involving a Bunsen burner, one of those ubiquitous gas burners used in labs to heat liquids, and an alarm clock that Hultin had modified to solve a vexing problem. 

[snip]

Porter thought that Hale might be amused by Hultin’s device. “He asked me to demonstrate,” Hultin said, explaining to Hale that it would not take long. “Then he asked me to set the alarm for ten seconds. After ten seconds, the alarm rang and the gas turned off. Hale just stood there. He said, ‘My God. For eighty years people have been ruining experiments around the world. And no one thought of this simple solution.’”

The men walked away, with Hale shaking his head in amazement. Two hours later, a secretary walked up to Hultin in the lab and told him that Porter had invited him to have lunch with Hale and several other select students and faculty members. It was a lunch in the faculty dining room, the sort of gathering that universities often arrange as an opportunity for the most promising or most senior graduate students to meet leading scientists from elsewhere. Such visitors might prove to be valuable contacts for students in the future. In the meantime, faculty members can have an opportunity to exchange their latest thoughts and data with intellectual leaders in their field. Hultin’s faculty advisor was present, as was Porter, four other faculty members, and three graduate students. And, of course, Hultin, who was invited in recognition of his invention.

That day, Hultin said, the conversation around the table at lunch ranged widely, focusing on science but flitting from topic to topic. Then Hale made an offhand remark about the 1918 influenza epidemic. It was a remark that was to change Hultin’s life.

“Everything has been done to elucidate the cause of that epidemic. But we just don’t know what caused that flu. The only thing that remains is for someone to go to the northern part of the world and find bodies in the permafrost that are well preserved and that just might contain the influenza virus.”

Hale was saying that if someone could find bodies of flu victims that had been frozen since the day they died, the intact virus that had killed them might be chilled to a state of suspended animation. If those corpses had remained buried in permanently frozen ground in the northern regions, the influenza virus that was in their lungs might still be alive. And if the virus could be brought back to the laboratory and revived, scientists might study it and figure out why it was so deadly. They also might be able to produce a vaccine against the disease.

The suggestion went unremarked. “It was a very short comment, it took just ten or fifteen seconds,” Hultin said. “Then he went on to something else.” But Hultin was transfixed. Of all the people in the room, of all the people in the world, he was uniquely positioned to do just what Hale had suggested. By chance alone, Hultin knew where to find permafrost, he knew how to find tiny outposts where people lived in regions where the ground was frozen year-round, he knew how to get permission from relatives to exhume flu victims buried in permafrost, he knew how to take tissue samples and how to preserve them, he knew how to coax viruses to grow in the laboratory, and he was working with a professor who was a renowned leader in influenza and could help him figure out the virus’s secrets.

“I knew this was for me,” Hultin recalled.