Chapter One: Safety and Ethics
Leona
Forty-eight year old Leona Anderson came onto a plain brown set, her interviewer's suit camouflaging into the background, the set's backdrop walls featured giant bright-blue ovals not out of place in a science fiction show. The audience featured primary coloured well-dressed people, thick rimmed glasses, straight hair curling upward at the bottom, and clean conservative cuts that she prayed would not grow out of style in the coming decades. The year was nineteen sixty eight and the Americans were racing the Russians into space, and here she was describing to the host how the world might end, or at least how most of its population would die.
Two interviewees faced the audience at an angle. The host, the annoyingly condescending Wallace Galigan, whose putdowns and jokes Leona would have filter through, faced the audience at a right angle to Leona's. In between them was the famous geneticist from Ceylon of all places, Dudley Kotelawala, who was present to explain how infectious organisms mutate and evolve.
Leona relished her cigarette as she endured Wallace's joke about humans being raised by chimpanzees. Why was it so difficult to explain natural selection and immunity when viruses evolve multiple times in the span of a year? Wallace's stuffy nose was probably the second in two years. She extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray on the brown table to her left, before going for another one. Her son often told her to stop smoking as it could damage her lungs. She loved him to death, but often failed to reason why he was so wrong on so many things.
She turned her chair towards the audience who, while they laughed at Wallace's joke at Dudley choosing Yale over Oxford, had curiosity she could appreciate. These were people who genuinely wanted to know about infectious disease and how humans can and have dealt with it. The beauty in being able to turn her chair on a floor-anchored pole was she did not have to see Wallace's face.
The discussion went over the types of organisms that could infect humanity. Parasites came up first, namely malaria. Entire parts of Africa went uninhabitable for outsiders, but nothing world threatening. Next came up bacteria. The bubonic plague wiped out half of Europe's population, and though close to world ending, Medieval states remained intact. Wallace and Dudley went back and forth on whether it spread through bodily fluids or airborne particles. Next was fungus. The whole room laughed. Cordyceps had millions of years to infect ants, one to one in species, but the thought of airborne spores forcing humanity to live in sealed indoor compartments and stems growing out of people's eyes made her nauseous. Next up was viruses. Leona's neck stood to attention.
"With the advent of air travel," she said. "What used to take years to spread across the world can now take weeks. Not even Madagascar was spared when we only had boats."
"Are viruses the thing that will truly drive us to the brink?" Wallace asked.
"No," Leona replied.
"Really?"
"No" she repeated.
"Alright, we're out of time."
Leona was ready to throw her tray if the closing music played.
"Humans have been fighting viruses for all of our existence," she said, "Sometimes more people die that in actual wars, as happened when the Spanish flu, but like with the plague, humans come back stronger for another round."
"So do you think viruses pose a threat?" Wallace asked.
"Absolutely!"
"Influenza?"
"No."
"Have you ever said yes to anyone?"
"My husband at graduation."
"So not influenza, but what?"
"It's not a matter of what is, but what created it. Much of our technology comes as a result of war. Why do you think the Russians put a dog in space? To stick it to us. Now imagine that type of thinking applied to disease."
Worried chatter came from the audience.
"Take a disease such as rabies. We have a vaccine and without it, it's always fatal, though its not taking out entire colonies of animals anytime soon. Imagine a variant of rabies tailored to a specific population, that is selected to control certain behaviours, that can split at many times the rate it currently can. Imagine if on a battlefield, soldier turned on soldier, and the enemy didn't have to advance an inch. Let me ask you, how did the plague spread to Europe?"
"It went with the Russians," Wallace joked.
The audience laughed. Leona wanted to throw her tray at the audience.
"Bear with me," she told them, "The Mongols were besieging Italians in Ukraine. The Mongols got some diseased bodies and catapulted them over. Then the Italians brought it to the Mediterranean. Ever heard of smallpox blankets. And this was before the idea of handwashing before a medical procedure took hold. Now for rabies, it doesn't work like normal viruses that attack our respiratory, our immune, or our circulatory systems. It attacks our very mind, it actually attacks who we are. It doesn't kill immediately, it reduces the brains functions to a husk of itself, all the while convincing the brain that what we need to survive: water, and it makes the patient fear what it needs to survive, slowly dehydrating it. And of course, we know rabies infects through bites. The bites transmit it to the nervous system where it works its way up to the brain, and a patient's saliva will contain the virus. So what does the virus make the patient: aggressive and frothing from the mouth. Now how would a bad actor make that virus even more infectious?"
"Make it airborne," Wallace answered. "Change the virus itself."
Dudley released a sigh of air.
"Lord Dudley, are you about to enter cardiac arrest?" Wallace asked.
"Viruses must never be changed!" he exclaimed. "Doing so violates the very ethical and safety principles that even Chinese doctors are sworn to uphold."
"True, they cannot be changed now," Leona said, "But…"
"Ethics and safety! We must not ask such questions!"
"Well, that's all the time we have today," Wallace ended. "Maybe somebody can change viruses for the greater good?"
"Ethics and safety!"
The closing music played.