How One Scientist Solved a Cold Case Using a Mouse

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]This guy solved one of the biggest mysteries in 20th century medicine using field mouse and pure stubbornness. His name is Ho-Wang Lee and he was a South Korean virologist. In the 1970s, everyone had basically given up on identifying the virus that killed thousands of soldiers in the Korean War.

[00:00:19]The trail had run cold and the technology was limited and most researchers had just moved on from it.

[00:00:25]But not Lee. He had a hunch, which was that he thought that the carrier had to be some sort of wild rodent, specifically the striped field mouse that lived in the rice paddies and grass banks where the sick soldiers had been stationed. And so in 1976, he caught a bunch of these mice and he took lung tissue from them and tested it against the blood from Korean War survivors. So these were the guys who had had the disease but didn't die. And then and the antibodies in their blood lit up against the antigens in the mouse lungs and that was a match and it was enough for him to conclude that the reservoir from where this virus was coming from was the mice.

[00:01:04]And so two years later, he isolated the actual virus and he named it Hantaan after the river the soldiers had fought near.