Resurrection

‘I don’t mind telling you I got pretty mad when these people put a stop to the WHO proposal to wipe it out altogether back in ‘95. All that rubbish about destroying something that God had created and what an interesting little beast it really was. Jesus! the only function a smallpox virus ever had on this earth was to kill human beings. There’s no intermediate vector, no animal hosts, no life cycle of its own; it only affects us and we’re talking about a fifty percent kill rate with Variolamajor.

‘As much as that?’

And that doesn’t mean to say the other fifty percent get better like nothing ever happened. More often than not it leaves the survivors brain damaged, sometimes mad, often blind, always disfigured. If you come out of it with only a face that looks like you stood in front of a grenade when it went off you can count yourself a very lucky person indeed.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘The worst.’

‘You’ve actually experienced it in the field then?’

‘1975, Somalia. I was with the WHO team who encircled the last outbreak. Like Apaches round a wagon train we were, closing in for the kill, vaccinating everything that moved so the disease couldn’t spread out from its epicentre.’

‘It must have given you a tremendous sense of achievement when you finally realised that you’d actually done it, wiped out a disease that’s plagued man throughout recorded history and probably before that.’

‘Damn right. Me and a few others, mainly Americans, got pie-eyed for a week but you know, it hardly made the papers back here.’

‘Really?’

‘People in this country had already forgotten what smallpox could do. By that time it was something that happened in far off lands. If we’d wiped out something that affected Cheltenham it might have been a different story but Africa? Bottom of page five if we were lucky. Until of course, the accident happened.’

‘Accident?’

‘Birmingham. Everyone thought it was okay to work on the virus under lab conditions. After all, you know exactly where the virus is at all times in the lab. Glass containers are much more predictable than human beings; they don’t cough, spit, throw up over you or bugger off to Majorca when they feel like it. We didn’t have the fancy containment facilities they have today and all the rules and regulations to go with it but we were still pretty careful in our own way. Each lab did its best; some were better than others of course. It was up to individual consultants to impose their own rules but Birmingham was a lesson to us all.

The damn thing got out of what everyone thought was a secure lab. It killed a woman medical photographer almost before we knew it and you know what the worst thing was? To this day we don’t know what really went wrong. We don’t know how it got out.’

Dewar was picking up a lot from Wright. The man was just talking conversationally but he found himself already developing a more than healthy respect for the virus.

‘After that there was no more working in hospital labs and the like with live smallpox. Thank God, there could have been many more accidents.’

‘My information is that there are only two places on earth that are allowed to store live smallpox?’ said Dewar.

‘That’s right, Atlanta and Koltsovo although some pessimists think it still might be viable in corpses of people who died of the disease.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said Dewar.

‘I’m not talking about bodies that have undergone normal decomposition,’ said Wright. ‘I’m talking about bodies subject to special environmental conditions. It’s been suggested that the permafrost regions of Russia might still harbour live smallpox in bodies buried there nearly a hundred years ago. The ground conditions would be just right.’

‘Requiescat in pace,’ said Dewar.

‘Amen to that,’ agreed Wright.

‘I’m told the entire smallpox genome has been DNA sequenced,’ said Dewar.

‘That’s right. We know every last base pair of its evil little self. A string of letters you can’t even make a word out of and it’s killed millions.’

‘Does that mean you could actually build it in the lab if you wanted?’

Wright smiled as if recognising the real reason for Dewar’s interest. ‘Who in their right mind would want to do that?’ he asked innocently.

‘I didn’t say anything about right mind.’

‘Point taken. No, there are easier ways of playing God. The genome has been cut into fragments so that researchers can work on bits of the virus.’

‘So I understand.’

‘And I’ve just heard about a ban being placed on the movement of these fragments,’ said Wright, putting two and two together. ‘Does that mean that you suspect someone of trying to re-assemble them?’

‘There’s no real evidence of that. It’s just a precaution,’ said Dewar. He didn’t want to insult a man of Wright’s intelligence by pretending that nothing at all was amiss.

‘But it’s something you’re looking into?’

Dewar nodded.

‘I wish you luck and hope to God, it really is just a precaution.’

‘For the sake of interest, Doctor, how would you go about doing it.’

‘Reconstruct the virus? I wouldn’t even consider it.’

‘But if you had to?’

‘I suppose I’d ligate the fragments or maybe start with another pox virus, something like cowpox and try converting it into Variolamajor with appropriate DNA changes.

‘Would that be easier?’

‘Not necessarily but not having tried it I couldn’t say for sure.’

Dewar admired the scientific answer. ‘I take it the authorities would know all about the possibility of altering another pox virus to become smallpox?’

‘Of course,’ replied Wright. There’s not only a ban on any institution having more than twenty percent of the smallpox genome in terms of DNA fragments, there’s also a ban on having any other pox virus in the same institution at the same time.’

‘If I were to tell you that an English lab has admitted to having two more fragments of the virus than it’s registered to have, would you find that suspicious?’

Wright threw back his head and laughed. ‘God no,’ he exclaimed. ‘You know what university labs are like. The only paperwork they’re interested in is the kind you publish to advance your career and get more grant money. Anything else is a pain that someone else will do but no one ever does. When the complaints come in they just scream, “infringement of academic freedom” and it works like a magic mantra. Politicians back off like vampires from a crucifix. They don’t like to be thought philistine’

‘I know how it goes,’ agreed Dewar.

Wright opened his desk drawer and took out a sheaf of papers. ‘I got these together for you,’ he said. ‘Everything you wanted or didn’t want to know about the smallpox virus.’

‘Thanks. I’m grateful.’

‘Don’t be. They paid me a consultancy fee. There’s one more thing they asked me to do.’’

‘What’s that?’

‘Vaccinate you.’

Institute of Molecular Sciences

Edinburgh.

‘I’ve got that list you wanted,’ said George Ferguson.

‘Good,’ said Malloy. ‘Everything check out?’