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Civil War vaccination kits, discovered in a drawer, yield genetic clues to how smallpox was defeated
As the world anxiously pins its hopes on vaccines to halt the coronavirus pandemic, scientists are still learning from the first global scourge to be eradicated by vaccination.
Ancient-DNA sleuths analyzing Civil War-era artifacts with 21st-century sequencing techniques have recreated five genomes of viral vaccines mustered to fight smallpox in the 1860s, finding they were quite different from those used a century later to finally wipe out the disease.
