The End of October by Lawrence Wright

Author:Lawrence Wright [Wright, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

26

The Human Trial

It was an opportunity, Jürgen had told him. Priceless. A test of their theory. This was after Jürgen had become a liability and left Fort Detrick. Congress was investigating some experiments that were hard to justify as defensive measures. It was all done in secret session, but leaks were beginning to spill. A decision was made to put distance between the CIA and the dark operations that had been farmed out to Fort Detrick. That meant cutting loose the talented impresario of manufactured diseases.

In the shadow world that surrounds the intelligence community, Jürgen Stark was well known, and as soon as he came on the market there were many competitive bids for his employment. Private security firms had mushroomed after 9/11 and the Iraq War. Trained by the best—the Navy SEALS, CIA, Mossad, South African paramilitaries—their operatives came from the worlds of intelligence and the military. Political consultants and academics were added to the mix, along with computer hackers from the National Security Agency. In addition to supplying hired killers, such firms could also function as turnkey interior or defense departments, fielding an actual army if the money was right.

Jürgen offered a competitive edge to the company that finally landed him, AGT Security Associates. The name gave nothing away. It was intentionally anodyne, although among those who moved in the shadows, AGT was known as the insider’s choice. The next step for private contractors like AGT was microbiology. Hiring Jürgen was a masterstroke. He was immediately the golden boy, the future of the company. Jürgen had a vision, and he knew all the secrets. One of them was Henry Parsons’s intriguing discovery.

At Fort Detrick, Henry had been working on polio derivatives. Poliomyelitis was one of the most dreaded pathogens of the early twentieth century. Like influenza, polio was an RNA virus, but it spread through food or water contaminated by human fecal matter—one of the reasons swimming pools were chlorinated. In the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of children were paralyzed each year. Hospitals had rows of iron lungs, the imprisoning mechanical respirator in which some victims were doomed to spend the rest of their lives. There was no cure for polio, but the near elimination of the disease caused by the introduction of the Salk and Sabin vaccines was one of medicine’s great triumphs. As Jürgen knew, however, a population with almost no exposure to polio also created an opportunity: the virus’s high rate of infectiousness and its unpredictable effects on the central nervous system made it an object of interest as a bioweapon.

Henry turned his attention to a common childhood infection called hand, foot, and mouth disease—also known as enterovirus 71—which was closely related to polio. Symptoms were normally mild, although severe cases sometimes occurred, especially in Asia, causing permanent neurological damage. Although Henry’s mandate was to explore the enteroviruses as a potential weapon, as a doctor he thought that if he could understand the mechanism that caused a harmless disease to become catastrophic he might unlock one of nature’s jealously held secrets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.