“Some people have a key intuition for it,” he said. “He was special in that way. His brain was wired right to do that kind of research.”
In recent years, Wiley studied how the proteins on the surface of a virus allow the virus to fuse with a cell and infect it.
In one of the last papers he published before he disappeared, Wiley presented the structures of two types of a protein that allow the flu virus to infect a target cell. This work followed up on work he had continued since his early years at Harvard.
The paper, published in the Sept. 15 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested how strains of influenza that arise in animals can eventually gain the ability to infect humans.
“Don had a remarkable instinct for important problems and a real drive to get the important answer instead of lots of particular answers,” Harrison said.
—Staff writer Jonathan H. Esensten can be reached at esensten@fas.harvard.edu.