Michael Osterholm, his face a pink-cheeked scowl, looked out across the table, beyond the packed room at the New York Academy of Sciences, and out through the windows. The New York Academy of Sciences is housed on the fortieth floor of 7 World Trade Center, and their endless bank of windows affords a staggering view of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. One reason that its view is so magnificent is that there’s a huge gap in the skyline–and a huge gouge in the ground–where the Twin Towers once stood.

Osterholm had come here from Minnesota, where he runs a research center for infections diseases and terrorism, to talk Thursday night about the threat of a new kind of flu sitting