A Rondelay (Without Cadenza) by the Virion of Influenza.

Now you have me--sucrose-banded,

Enveloped and negative-stranded

Spiked and cleaved and slightly dented

Into pieces eight, segmented--

Without mercy I've been strained

Through filters--then been bromelained, and

Torn apart by each detergent

With a haste unseemly, urgent--

All my helices displayed

Just to show you how I'm made.

My polypeptides have been mapped

My hemagglutinin unwrapped--

All my sequences are clear--

All the way from Arg to Ser.

With techniques sharp and newly honed

My very genes have now been cloned--

Transplanted to an alien host

Wherein my evanescent ghost

As solitary as an elf

Has managed to express myself.

And scientists have labored nights

To probe my antigenic sites

Some fresh from school with new diplomas

(Aided by their hybridomas)

Scramble up trimeric slopes

Counting all my epitopes

And every Ph.D. or pupil

Utterly devoid of scruple

Mates me with complete abandon--

Asks, then, why my genes are random

Can I kiss and never tell

When genotyped upon a gel?

Which, if inspected with acuity

Will document my promiscuity--

Must you write, in fat reports

How flagrantly I reassort?

No boundaries have my misbehavin'

Horsey set or duck or avian--

In other moments less sublime

You've put my perils before swine!

And yet in 1981

Despite the work that has been done

The epidemics come and go

As regular as winter snow.

And people cough and people die

And all of you still wonder why.

I'm so perverse and ever mutable

And so eternally unscrutable.

But think about just what you'd do

If there were really

No more flu!

Courtesy of the Author. Published in Genetic Variation among Influenza Viruses. DP Nayak, editor. New York: Academic Press, Inc.; 1981.

Dr Kilbourne has spent most of his professional lifetime, beginning in 1948, on the study of influenza. During his tenure at five medical institutions, he has contributed particularly to discoveries that have facilitated vaccine development. As an avocation, he has published light verse and essays that have appeared in a number of nonmedical periodicals, including Saturday Review; some of his works have been collected recently in book form in Strategies of Sex. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Philosophical Society, among other honorary societies. He may be contacted by email: [e-mail]