"There are always going to be people who don't like what you say when the stakes are high."

"When we think of plagues, we think of strange and terrible illnesses. AIDS. Ebola. Anthrax spores. And, of course, the Black Death," writes Gina Kolata in Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It, just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. What we rarely think of is the seemingly innocuous flu. Even though a deadly strain of the virus swept the world in 1918, killing at least 20 million people (and possibly as many as 100 million), only to disappear rather mysteriously when the First World War ended, the epidemic is rarely mentioned in history books. In fact, it was only while the veteran New York Times reporter was researching her book that her husband, Bill, a mathematician, realized his own family had been scarred by the disease. His grandfather's death in 1918 at a relatively young age made much more sense within the context of the epidemic than as the result of the enigmatic "pneumonia" to which his mother had always ascribed it. "It became an obsession of mine and my husband's to find references to the 1918 flu," Kolata relates. "Every time there was a television show on the History Channel about World War I, we would watch it and say, ˜I wonder if they're going to say anything about the 1918 flu,' " she recalls with a glint in her eye.

Kolata's ability to focus intensely on a subject has served her well. Clone, her 1998 book about Dolly, the genetically engineered Scottish ewe, was completed in just three months. For Flu, Farrar, Straus & Giroux gave her "a whole year" -- not the kind of deadline this journalist is used to. The training ground for such high-octane productivity may be the double row of open, waist-high cubicles where the Times's science writers labor elbow-to-elbow within shouting distance of their editors. PW has followed the trim and diminutive Kolata past the hubbub around her desk into the dim, relatively quiet corner office where the Week in Review editors usually hold their conferences. Her warmth reigned in by professional reserve, Kolata talks like she writes: in concise sentences that convey her clear-eyed enthusiasm for her work.

Born in Baltimore 30 years after the epidemic, Kolata says she knew little about the phenomenon when, in March 1997, she followed up on a Science magazine cover story about Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger and his team of researchers, who had miraculously extracted fragments of the virus from the remains of a WWI soldier. Usually viruses, which can only live in tissue, disappear when a corpse becomes a skeleton. But Taubenberger had a tissue sample. Although Kolata enjoyed writing her piece for the Times, she didn't see Taubenberger's research as an ongoing story. Then, in early 1998 she learned of retired Swedish pathologist Johan Hultin, who sought out 1918 flu victims buried in Alaskan permafrost. "He was the most charming guy, and he had tales to tell that were just incredible. I was crazy about him."

Around that time, a publisher proposed that she expand on a series she had written for the Times in January 1998 about a deadly strain of E. coli bacterium. Kolata didn't think the story was worth a book, but she said to her literary agent, John Brockman, " 'If they really want a book about disease, what about the 1918 flu?' I knew there was a story there, but I didn't know quite how good it was until I got started on it." Having studied molecular biology on the graduate level at MIT for a year and a half before returning to the University of Maryland, where she had been an undergraduate, to earn a master's degree in mathematics, Kolata evinces great affection for her subject. "I think of all the books I've written, this was the most interesting -- for me. Every scientist that I dealt with was wonderful.' "

She has only positive things to say about the publication process at FSG, her sixth publisher in as many books. "They were wonderful, really good, and John Glusman was a great editor. My instinct is that, when you write for the general public, you keep the scientific detail down to a minimum. But John kept saying, 'I want more detail, I want to know what is actually happening in the lab.' " Kolata is quick to add that she's never had a bad editor. "I haven't changed publishers for any special reason. When Brockman comes to me and says, 'Here's the best offer,' it has never occurred to me to question it. I really don't pay attention at that level. He d s it all."

Flu's progress was especially smooth compared to Kolata's adventures with Clone (William Morrow). Then, it was Brockman who pressed her to explore at book length the story she broke in the Times about one of the century's most startling biological breakthroughs. "The topic was incredibly intellectually exciting," she enthuses, "and the implications are incredible still." With a daughter at college and a son finishing high school, Kolata didn't take more than a day or two off from the Times to write the book. "I'm very energetic, and I don't get tired. I have no trouble focusing, or changing my focus from a story I'm working on here to a book I'm writing at home. I would work on weekends, I would work at night. With Clone, I actually worked on the train" -- a three-and-a-half-hour round-trip ride from Princeton, N.J., to Times Square. On top of her tight deadline, Kolata found it nearly impossible to speak with Ian Wilmut, the head of the cloning project, who was besieged by the media. "I used every single sentence he ever gave me. That was a challenge: to do a book where the lead person didn't do the experiment, probably didn't conceive of it, was not available and was not charismatic." She shakes her head. "He was clearly overwhelmed -- the whole world was after him; I was one of millions. And," she adds wryly, "he has the same agent as I do!" She waits a beat for PW to register this additional detail, then dissolves into a peal of laughter.

Kolata knows what it's like to be sought after. In 1987, when she came to the New York Times from Science magazine (which she had joined after graduate school, working her way up from a clerical job to senior writer), agents immediately flocked to her. "I was so taken aback with this because I'd thought getting an agent was supposed to be so difficult," she remembers. At that point, Kolata had already written two (unagented) books, one on high blood pressure and the other on heart disease. Agent Barbara Lowenstein distinguished herself from the pack with her persistence, and matched Kolata with an editor at Delacorte who was interested in a book on fetal medicine. The Baby Doctors: Probing the Limits of Fetal Medicine, published in 1990, was the result. Unfortunately, the editor and the publicist left the company "practically the day after the book was published."

In 1992, Kolata received a call from Brockman, known as a formidable negotiator on behalf of an exclusive cluster of stellar science writers. Three of his clients -- Robert Michael, John Ganyon and Edward Laumann -- wanted Kolata to help them write a book about the results of their forthcoming comprehensive study of American sexual habits. Brockman was straightforward. "He said, 'I represent the authors. If you want to work with them, I have to represent you,' " recalls Kolata. She hit it off with Ganyon. She was also taken with the quality of the raw material. So she signed on. The 1995 tour for Sex in America was Kolata's first -- and she was the appointed spokesperson. Even though the book was deluged with attention -- perhaps even overexposed -- she remembers those few weeks in the media's eye as a lark. "You just say the same thing over and over to people, and you always have to look enthusiastic. It was not exactly a lot of work."

Kolata's visibility, her high-powered agent and her string of book contracts are the dream of many writers. But as she has discovered, the combination can become volatile when it comes to breaking science stones. On May 3, 1998, the Times ran her article about Dr. Judah Folkman's studies in mice, which appeared to point to a potential cancer cure, on the front page. As Kolata tells it, Brockman called her the Sunday it appeared to say the research would make a great book. "I said, ˜Well, only if it works [in humans].' " Her tone is clipped, emphatic. "But the time to sell a book is now," she remembers him saying. "Just send me an e-mail saying you'll do a book. I can get you a couple million dollars." Kolata's deep brown eyes light up: "Which I didn't believe for a minute because I thought no publisher would be so stupid as to do a book on the basis of something that might not work -- and we won't know that for years. So I wrote a little e-mail that just sort of said that if there's a story, I'll write a book."

Brockman submitted the e-mail pitch to publishers that Monday, only to withdraw it the next day after a Los Angeles Times article, which set off an avalanche of negative press, implied that Kolata had hyped the still-preliminary medical advances in her New York Times story and engineered its timing and placement in order to drive up the advance for her book proposal. "If you know how this place works, you know what a joke that is!" she exclaims, rolling her eyes. To her shock, Newsday writer Robert Cooke garnered a reported million-dollar book contract for his proposal on the subject the next day -- thanks in part to Kolata's front-page story.

What would she do differently today? "I wouldn't have written the e-mail. I would have said, 'Nothing is so important that it has to be done this day.' I would discuss it with people here. What bothered me was that people would think that I would use the newspaper to get money for a book. And I don't fault Brockman, either. His job is to try to get a book for the most money possible, at the right time. And it would be my job to say 'no' if I think that's inappropriate.' "

Kolata's had her critics. When she assumed the AIDS beat at the Times in the late 1980s, her stories highlighting the dangers of "parallel track" drug trials won her the enmity of AIDS activists (who picketed the Times publisher's home as well as the office). In the wake of the controversy over her piece on Folkman, the Nation and Brill's Content published sharp critiques that also extended to her articles on food irradiation and on the court battles over the purported ill effects of breast implants, among others. Accused of hyping stories and of being a corporate apologist, she has responded that she has no agenda. While Kolata acknowledges last year was not easy, she stands by her reporting. After the criticisms appeared, "I talked to editors and colleagues at the Times and I thought about what I did to leave myself open to this. But I couldn't sit there and say I was going to let this affect me in going about my job. I have ultimate confidence that what I wrote was correct; it has stood the test of time."

So what, in Kolata's view, is the task of a science writer? "I have to look for the data and the logic [of science in progress], at what people say who don't have a vested stake in the outcome, who are knowledgeable observers but not participants. [As a reporter,] you have to have the courage of your convictions about what the science says. There are always going to be people who don't like what you say when the stakes are high."

Although unafraid to step into the midst of controversy, she d sn't see herself as a mediator between scientists and the public. "I don't care what way the science comes out. It makes no difference to me as as long as there's a good story."

As she explains at the conclusion of Flu, that story, too, is still evolving. Even though Jeffrey Taubenberger has made solid headway with sequencing a pivotal gene -- his research is moving at a pace that may yield a new epilogue for the paperback next year -- the origins of the 1918 flu and the reason it proved so lethal are still a mystery and a deadly recurrence remains possible. As for her next book? Kolata smiles. "I have no idea."" Indeed, who knows what story will hit her desk next?