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These pages, originally designed for the benefit of potential agents and editors, are now being maintained as background information for the book. I hope they also serve as something of a tutorial for emerging writers on how one can set up an informational site for their manuscript (although my own experience suggests that the effort might be better spent elsewhere, although I couldn't say exactly where). In addition to the Introduction which follows, this page contains links to several documents:
Introduction: So you were lucky last year and you escaped the usual bout with the flu. Planning to do the same thing this year, of course. Head along to your local HMO and get that flu shot they so generously provide for free. Well, maybe you are paying for it, but heck, it's worth every dime. Remember that time you were out for two solid weeks? Don't want to repeat that again. As much as we dread getting the flu, the common strains in circulation today---though they kill upwards of 30,000 people every year in the U.S. alone---are generally rather tame as infectious killer viruses go. But they need not be. By the time the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 had passed, more than twenty million people worldwide were dead. Some experts have put the figure at twice that number. It's certainly comforting to know that this particular strain is gone for good. But is it? What if it turned out someone back then had thought ahead, and preserved a sample of the virus? Would we consider bringing it back to life if we could? For the sake of learning, perhaps, how to prevent a similar future pandemic? Of course we would. The potential payoff is too great. Scientists would jump at the chance. Then again, so might less altruistically-minded folk. And that's one of the core story elements behind "Ninth Day of Creation"---the resurrection of the 1918 Spanish Flu virus by a vaccine-cum-gene therapy biotechnology company called Immunological Technologies, of San Diego. Sound far-fetched? Well, until recently, we really did think that no one had set aside a sample of the 1918 microbe. But someone did. The United States Army, in fact. Although they weren't aware of it at the time, their habitual collection of autopsy specimens from U.S. servicemen since the time of the Civil War would result in the preservation of this killer's genome for the next eighty years. Rediscovered after all this time, the genes of 1918 are now being sequenced at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington, D.C., by cellular pathologist Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger. Now, what might happen if during an international crisis that threatened to topple the U.S. from its position as sole world superpower, the government reluctantly concluded that that secret biotechnology program might be the only way to regain the upper hand? You can find out in Ninth Day of Creation.
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Biochemist races to
