What is it this time, Thompson? Honestly, after I graduated from Northeastern and accepted a job here at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center(1), I thought I was moving into a cushy government position. Instead, I’m constantly solving problems that YOU
—What is it this time, Thompson? Honestly, after I graduated from Northeastern and accepted a job here at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center(1), I thought I was moving into a cushy government position. Instead, I’m constantly solving problems that YOU create. What, is the vending machine out of pretzels again?…Actually, you look kinda pale, Thompson. What’s…uhh, what’s going on? —Umm…You remember how last week you asked me to clean out those old labs on floor 3? —…Yes…and… —Well, I did. And in Lab 323-B there were a bunch of dusty, old beakers and vials to get rid of. I figured I couldn’t just throw them in the trash if they still had liquid inside, because I worked for a summer at a fast food place where I had to take out the trash, and I hated it when customers would throw away a full cup of soda because it would always spill out of the bag on to my shoes. So before throwing away those beakers last week, I poured down the drain any liquid they had inside. —OK, that’s extremely bad lab hygiene. But, I have a feeling there’s more to this story… —Well, this morning I found a lab notebook that listed the contents of those beakers. —Wait a minute. Did you say Lab 323-B? —Yes, boss, Lab 323-B. One of the beakers I emptied into the sink…it contained… —No, no please, no. One of the old prion(2) experiments from the 1970’s? —Yeah. Prion 8LZ. —You poured a vial of prion 8LZ down the drain? Where it will go into the public sewer system? You know as well as I do that prions won’t get filtered out by the sewage treatment system. And, if that was a week ago, that’s enough time for the “treated” water to be released… —Yes, I know. That’s what I needed to tell you, boss: prion 8LZ is in the public water system. —OK, so for sure some people are already infected, but we don’t know how many. Let’s think rationally. What do we know about this prion? —I know that, unlike most prions, this one causes fairly rapid neurodegeneration. —Yes, and I know prion 8LZ was bioengineered to make it contagious. OK. We need to understand 8LZ’s replication behavior so that we can decide how to diagnose, cure, and/or quarantine the population. Alright, here’s the plan. Thompson, you contact the emergency response team. I’ll stay here and implement a model of the pandemic that we—actually, that you, Thompson—might have started. I know we have some data from those old experiments. That will get me started. I’ll work up a mathematical model of the disease transmission and then study the behavior of the model for different values of the remaining variables. We’ll submit a report on our model within a week.
