Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018

Rogue viruses and pathogens
Genome engineering: It never ends well

by Lee A. Everett

I recently watched a friend play a popular video game. His character was an assassin, and one of his missions involved stealing a virus from a laboratory—a relatively common trope, right? But as the character manhandled his way into the lab, charged by the bewildered scientists, grabbed the vial, and left by a side door straight onto a busy street, the most memorable part of the gameplay—to me—was how unfeasible it was.

We’ve all witnessed the heist of a biologic agent in some form or another. (And when I refer to an agent, I mean the bacteria, virus, protein, alien technology, or compound of interest.) It’s fun to write and it’s fun to read, but two things these scenarios usually have in common are the seeming ignorance of the types of places these agents are kept, and the mechanisms put in place to keep people and the environment safe from the agent.

When handled wrong, any reader with a small amount of experience in the area is likely to doubt the credibility of your plot for the duration of the book. I don’t think that’s the sort of notable mention most of us are going for when setting out to write a novel.

Unless you’re going to pull a “many Bothans died” and sweep the getting of the agent under the rug (it doesn’t matter how we got it, we just got it!), you’re going to need to break your character in and out of the lab in a believable way.

All about the agent

So what are the top three things you should consider when brainstorming the agent for your “virus gone rogue” novel?

1. WHAT THE AGENT DOES

How does it affect the target? Is it contagious to humans only, or animals as well? Most important: How is it spread and how long can it live outside the host? An agent that can be aerosolized—spread through the air (like influenza), especially one that can survive outside of the host for a long time—is a lot more dangerous than one only spread by direct contact, sexual contact, or ingestion. The way you’d try to contain a flu-like agent would be a bit different from how you’d try to contain an Ebola-like agent, and they’d have different epidemiologic impacts. With the flu, preventing respiratory spread is key. People working with pathogenic flus will wear various types of respirators to protect themselves and lab-dedicated clothing to keep from carrying the virus outside the lab. But with Ebola and its ability to spread through direct contact, researchers need to protect themselves even more strenuously. They wear “space suit”-like positive air pressure suits hooked to an air supply coming from outside the lab so no part of their body or the air they’re breathing can come in contact with the agent.

Get creative! There are a lot of dastardly agents out there that are quirkier than a highly pathogenic flu or a hemorrhagic disease. For example, prions aren’t even alive—they’re misfolded proteins—yet they are one of the hardest agents to destroy, are highly contagious, and diseases caused by them are incurable (as well as invariably fatal).

2. AGENT CREATION AND STORAGE

What the agent can do and how stable it is are going to impact how scientists create and store it. Additionally, how hardy an agent is will determine how mobile it is and how long your characters will be able to handle and keep it without some pretty specialized equipment. Does the agent need to be inoculated into a carrier host to keep it viable, or will a splash of it still be infective on the ground a decade later?

The Mycobacterium that causes leprosy, for example, can only be grown within live tissue, while other bacteria like Clostridium can form spores that persist in the environment for years before infecting a host. Viruses, which hijack host cells for replication, may have capsids that protect the viral genetic material like a shield, allowing them to live outside a host longer than viruses without capsids. In general, viruses and bacteria can be “cultured” (kept alive in nutritional broth or media in refrigerators or incubators) but very high or low temperatures will kill them. Yet body tissues containing prions can still be infective after being stored at -80˚ C.

Theoretically, rogue pathogens created on Earth may have more constraints and limitations than something like an alien pathogen. Foreign to the planet, these would likely be able to survive temperature fluctuations and levels of radiation that Earth-borne pathogens have never been exposed to—and may be a lot harder to contain.

3. BIOSECURITY AND BIOCONTAINMENT

Now here’s the part that will likely impact your plot the most: How do the characters handle the biosecurity and biocontainment of the facility they’re breaking into? These are the procedures designed to keep a “rogue virus event” from ever happening (without nefarious interference, anyway). Most facilities have primary and secondary means of containment: the ways they keep people and the environment safe from the agent.

Containment: your character’s main adversary

There are four biosafety level (BSL) designations created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The riskier an agent is to work with, the more facilities/controls are necessary to keep people and the environment safe, and thus the agent should be contained in a higher BSL lab. BSL-1 facilities house agents that typically don’t cause human disease (like non-pathogenic Escherichia coli); at BSL-2, the agents pose moderate hazards to humans and may be found normally in the population (like Salmonella). At BSL-3, the agents can cause severe or lethal disease and are often spread by aerosolization (like tuberculosis); security and personnel clearance thresholds need to be increased because some diseases worked with at BSL-3 facilities could be potential agents in biological terrorism (like anthrax or the plague). At the potentially deadly BSL-4 (something really risky to work with, something that can infect humans but for which we have no cure—an alien virus, for example), there is going to be a lot of security within the building. After going through suitability assessments and background checks to get access to the building, there are lots of locked layers to get through before you reach the lab, likely involving keys or swipe cards—even biometric scanning.

Infiltrating the Lab

And of course, there will be security personnel and security cameras to thwart. Blackmailing or otherwise manipulating someone who already is cleared to enter these spaces might be the simplest way of infiltrating the lab, or perhaps technology can be used to circumvent the surveillance. But what happens once you get inside?

If you’re sneaking in or trying to blend in with the staff, then step one, you’re going to head to the locker room and get naked. Yup, nothing that goes into a lab containing such a deadly agent is going to be able to come out without some serious decontamination. That includes people.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

So you strip completely and put on facility PPE: often long-sleeved scrubs, socks, shoes (probably Crocs), hairnet, special respirator that you’ve been approved to use, and two layers of gloves. To get back out of the lab once you’ve done your thing, there is a careful order of removing PPE so it can be autoclaved, decontaminated with chemicals, or destroyed. Then you shower before you’re allowed to go back to the locker room.

Chances are, if you are trying to steal an agent, you don’t really care if you expose the outside world to it—so perhaps you skip the shower. But putting on the proper PPE is the best way to blend in and decrease the chances that the staff or scientists notice you don’t belong there.

Once you leave the locker room and head toward the lab, if you want to prevent yourself from getting sick from the agent, you’re going to pull on a Tyvek suit with a powered air-purifying respirator at BSL-3; or at the BSL-4, one of those positive pressure ventilated space suits where you’re hooked into a wall air supply. The goal of these is to blow clean air to you, while also pushing potential contaminate away from you. (It’s uncomfortable, hot, and loud under all those layers! If your character has any sort of communication device—or fear of enclosed spaces—you’re going to need to handle that additional conflict.)

Lab Containment Measures

Now you’re inside the lab, and your PPE is keeping you safe from the agent. What’s keeping the lab space and rest of the environment safe? Ideally, the agent should be so contained that the lab itself remains clean. If you’re following proper procedure (ahem, not breaking it out of the lab), agents will always be worked with under some sort of hood or biosafety cabinet. These are special working spaces that use a wall of air to keep the agent inside the cabinet and contaminants outside, and are ventilated so the air passing over the agent is HEPA-filtered before being vented outside or recirculated.

Or, at the BSL-4, the agent may be kept in a completely sealed cabinet and can only be manipulated using thick, unwieldy gloves attached to the unit. To reach the agent, a character is going to have to bust the agent out of that containment cabinet somehow and keep herself safe from it as she heads back out of the locker room—if someone doesn’t catch her first.

Contamination Shutdowns

We could talk for a while about airflow back in these facilities, but suffice it to say, if the all-important airflow is ever messed up, or if there is a biological spill, all workers must immediately leave and the whole lab gets shut down until everything is back to normal. The distraction of that sort of chaos might be ideal cover for the theft. In the event of emergency (power loss, natural disaster), you’re going to have to quickly be able to leave the lab, yet do so in a manner that won’t contaminate the outside world. Usually this involves putting extra, clean PPE on top of what you’re already wearing to trap any contaminant inside with you as you head to an emergency meeting point—which will be separate from where the rest of the building is meeting.

Often, local fire departments and hospitals are kept aware of the type of work going on in the labs and receive extra training on what to do and where to go in medical emergencies. If some sort of emergency was staged and your character had allies among the paramedics or fire department, that might be another unobtrusive way to slip an agent out.

In summary

Understandably, including all these detailed layers in your narrative could start to feel a little bulky. But I think it’s important that, as a writer, you’ve thought about these aspects—at least in terms of setting and world building—so the characters can subvert them in a believable way. How a character handles biosecurity measures can really impact the plot—especially when things start to go wrong—because stealing a deadly, world-altering virus shouldn’t be easy, right?