Stolen Virus
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Veterinary virologist Jason Mitchell can’t keep his mouth shut, can’t lie convincingly, and can’t follow orders. He’s an unlikely candidate to help the CIA locate and destroy a deadly hybrid virus stolen from Jason’s lab at the University of Minnesota. From Washington to Djibouti, From Minneapolis to Yemen, Marines cringe, Senators turn livid, and CIA agents shudder as Jason struggles to prevent the virus from becoming a biological weapon in the hands of terrorists.
Paperback and e-books available. ISBN 978-1-939371-92-8 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-939371-93-5 (eBook) Humorous/Action & Adventure/Medical Thriller Publication date: May 3, 2016 |
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The Writing of Stolen Virus
I’m a veterinary microbiologist with 19 years of experience in R&D working on veterinary vaccines. I’m not a virologist, but I oversaw clinical research on Bovine Coronavirus (BCV) for an international pharmaceutical company for several years. During that time, the people who worked on the studies often developed mild diarrhea that lasted only a day or two. Were they infected with BCV? It was never proven, but several of us thought so.
BCV mutates so rapidly that it is now known as a quasi-species, and it was once thought that the North American variant of BCV was the most closely related virus known to the original SARS, now known as SARS-1.
I started graduate school when I was 42. That’s kind of old for a PhD candidate. In school, I rubbed elbows with many younger graduate students. One of them, a Pakistani grad student, routinely dressed better than the faculty. He behaved like a prince. I suspected that his family was politically connected and that he’d never had to work hard; he resented being treated like a slave (graduate student.) He’d bounced from one graduate advisor to another because he refused to do the work expected of graduate students. Just before he left St. Paul for Pakistan, he told me he hoped to destroy the remaining samples from his studies. He knew that his graduate advisor was depending on those samples for his next graduate student. I’d never seen that level of resentment in a man before.
About that time, I learned that hybrid viruses could be formed when two similar viruses infected the same cell. It’s a result of an accident during the replication of the virus. It is now known that that is how the AIDs virus was formed. A chimpanzee that ate monkeys of different species became infected with two different types of SIVs (Simian Immunosuppressive Viruses), and a hybrid was formed. When a Bantu tribesman cut himself while butchering an infected chimpanzee, the AIDs virus infected a human for the first time.
Molecular studies indicate that this happened between 1910 and 1917. It may have happened many times before, but during this time, agents of King Leopold of Belgium were raising hell in the Congo. Men and children were forced to work in the diamond mines under brutal conditions. Families and tribes were uprooted. People starved. Native peoples were under terrible stress. That weakened their immune systems. Viruses from animals that they might easily have destroyed could now infect their bodies, mutate, and gradually adapt to infect people. And thus, the AIDs virus was loosed on the human population.
I also met graduate students from China while at the U. of MN. What if a Chinese graduate student arrived in St. Paul incubating the SARS virus and was assigned to help in a BCV study? The student would be under stress from travel, his immune system would be weakened, and he’d be exposed to BCV. The requirements to form a hybrid virus would be met, and a new virus might be loosed upon a dense and naïve population of people. The rest of the book almost wrote itself.
Creating a bioweapon from a hybrid virus is much more complicated than normally presented in fiction. I wanted this book to be closer to reality than the normal book of this nature, and I wanted it to stand spy books of the style of 007 on their heads. I also wanted to write a book with a fair amount of humor. Thus, this book is part Sci-fi and part satire.
About the title: The book was first published in 2016 under the title A Jerk, a Jihad, and a Virus. It got great reviews (except for one reviewer who normally only reviewed magazine articles on knitting,) but sales were disappointing. I learned that the reading public had stopped buying anything with “Jihad” in the name. We checked and found that the term “Jihad” was only mentioned once in the text of the book, so we changed the name to Stolen Virus in 2019. That was just in time to be accused of trying to make money off the SARS-2 (Covid-19) pandemic. Some days you just can’t win. I hope you enjoy Stolen Virus.
BCV mutates so rapidly that it is now known as a quasi-species, and it was once thought that the North American variant of BCV was the most closely related virus known to the original SARS, now known as SARS-1.
I started graduate school when I was 42. That’s kind of old for a PhD candidate. In school, I rubbed elbows with many younger graduate students. One of them, a Pakistani grad student, routinely dressed better than the faculty. He behaved like a prince. I suspected that his family was politically connected and that he’d never had to work hard; he resented being treated like a slave (graduate student.) He’d bounced from one graduate advisor to another because he refused to do the work expected of graduate students. Just before he left St. Paul for Pakistan, he told me he hoped to destroy the remaining samples from his studies. He knew that his graduate advisor was depending on those samples for his next graduate student. I’d never seen that level of resentment in a man before.
About that time, I learned that hybrid viruses could be formed when two similar viruses infected the same cell. It’s a result of an accident during the replication of the virus. It is now known that that is how the AIDs virus was formed. A chimpanzee that ate monkeys of different species became infected with two different types of SIVs (Simian Immunosuppressive Viruses), and a hybrid was formed. When a Bantu tribesman cut himself while butchering an infected chimpanzee, the AIDs virus infected a human for the first time.
Molecular studies indicate that this happened between 1910 and 1917. It may have happened many times before, but during this time, agents of King Leopold of Belgium were raising hell in the Congo. Men and children were forced to work in the diamond mines under brutal conditions. Families and tribes were uprooted. People starved. Native peoples were under terrible stress. That weakened their immune systems. Viruses from animals that they might easily have destroyed could now infect their bodies, mutate, and gradually adapt to infect people. And thus, the AIDs virus was loosed on the human population.
I also met graduate students from China while at the U. of MN. What if a Chinese graduate student arrived in St. Paul incubating the SARS virus and was assigned to help in a BCV study? The student would be under stress from travel, his immune system would be weakened, and he’d be exposed to BCV. The requirements to form a hybrid virus would be met, and a new virus might be loosed upon a dense and naïve population of people. The rest of the book almost wrote itself.
Creating a bioweapon from a hybrid virus is much more complicated than normally presented in fiction. I wanted this book to be closer to reality than the normal book of this nature, and I wanted it to stand spy books of the style of 007 on their heads. I also wanted to write a book with a fair amount of humor. Thus, this book is part Sci-fi and part satire.
About the title: The book was first published in 2016 under the title A Jerk, a Jihad, and a Virus. It got great reviews (except for one reviewer who normally only reviewed magazine articles on knitting,) but sales were disappointing. I learned that the reading public had stopped buying anything with “Jihad” in the name. We checked and found that the term “Jihad” was only mentioned once in the text of the book, so we changed the name to Stolen Virus in 2019. That was just in time to be accused of trying to make money off the SARS-2 (Covid-19) pandemic. Some days you just can’t win. I hope you enjoy Stolen Virus.
