WHEN TONY GOLDBERG RECEIVED AN exuberant, enigmatic text message—“You gotta come into the lab!”—the epidemiologist turned his car around and headed straight back to his office at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He found his postdoc, Sam Sibley, transfixed by the computer monitor. Sibley had just finished running blood serum from a long-dead Bald Eagle through a powerful machine that searches out all traces of genetic material. Comparing the results to a database of all the world’s known viruses, the computer had spit back a surprising match.
Peering at the screen, Goldberg realized the viral code displayed before him was something completely new. Bizarrely, it appeared to be a relative of human hepatitis C, an infectious disease that causes liver damage. At the time, in 2017, a virus of this type had never been found in a bird before.
It was the first break in a case that’s perplexed wildlife investigators for 25 years. Starting in the 1990s, a strange illness called Wisconsin River eagle syndrome suddenly began afflicting Bald Eagles living around the Wisconsin River. Winter after winter, the eagle plague returned, killing every bird known to contract it and defeating every scientist who tried to find its source.“This is like an episode of ‘House’ for veterinary medicine,” Goldberg says. “It’s a mystery disease that came through the door—that people threw the kitchen sink at—and no one, despite a lot of effort, has been able to figure it out.”
Standing in the fresh glow of discovery, his fingers tingling, Goldberg remembers basking in “this grand vision of having solved the whole thing.” Months later, however, he realized that the puzzle was vastly more complicated than he originally supposed. Additional testing revealed that the strange
