What would happen if avian flu, which kills six out of 10 people infected, could jump from person to person instead of just from birds to people? And what if swine flu, which can be transmitted between people but has a low mortality rate of just 1 percent to 4 percent, suddenly became much more lethal? Those are some of the questions that IBM researcher Ruhong Zhou is putting through the Blue Gene supercomputer at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown.
Fighting the Flu with Technology
May 11, 2009