Digging in a cemetery on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, Norway, medical scientists found the seven coffins they were looking for, but the coffins were not what they wanted to find. They had hoped they would be six feet deep, in permafrost, where the bodies would still be frozen and well preserved 80 years after dying in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Even so, members of the exhumation project said they got what they came for: samples of tissues from six of the flu victims. They denied earlier published reports that the coffins contained only bones and no retrievable tissue specimens.