The Laptev Virus

Most good stories have strong roots in truth, and that is also the case with THE LAPTEV VIRUS. I first got the idea for writing this novel from an article I read about the discovery of Megaviridae, and Giant viruses which were orders of magnitude larger than any that had ever been seen before. Drs. Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, working at the Structural & Genomic Information laboratory (IGS, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University) are world renowned experts in this area, and it was one of their latest discoveries, the Pithovirus sibericum, found under the permafrost and believed to be 30,000 years old, which became the premise for this novel. The researchers stated clearly that this Pithovirus is not a human pathogen, but they suggested that there could be others which are pathogens and are lying dormant in the frozen soil.

Their original scientific publication, (Legendre M, Bartoli J, Shmakova L, Jeudy S, Labadie K, Adrait A, Lescot M, Poirot O, Bertaux L, Bruley C, Couté Y, Rivkina E, Abergel C, Claverie JM (2014) Thirty-thousand-year-old distant relative of giant icosahedral DNA viruses with a pandoravirus morphology. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 111: 4274-4279) can be found on-line and should definitely be read by all who are interested in the fascinating topic of these colossal viruses.

While I’m on the subject, I would like to take a moment to congratulate Drs. Claverie and Abergel and their team of researchers on their discovery of the still viable 30,000 year old Pithovirus sibericum which has been cited as number 53 in the Top 100 Stories of 2014 in the scientific journal, Discover.

The Los Angeles Times story that I use in the Prologue of this novel is an excerpt of the actual article that appeared on that date, but there were some factual errors in the report which, with the help of Dr. Claverie, I have corrected. Those corrections are in brackets.

Obviously, the Houston Chronicle article that is read in Sarah’s lab is entirely fictional.

Good stories also have parts that are exaggerated for effect, and I willingly admit that I took liberties with several truths. First and foremost, of course, is the fact that none of the giant viruses (which I call megaviruses in the novel, though technically the viruses discovered in the Arctic do not belong to that scientific genre) discovered to date in different parts of the planet are human pathogens. I cannot help but agree with Dr. Claverie and his team that finding pathogens we thought were eradicated, or of which we were not aware, is one of many perils that comes with the melting of our polar ice caps. It may just be a matter of time before we find a cousin of smallpox or some other nefarious pathogen which had been frozen in time.

Another area where I stretched the truth was in the speed with which Sarah and her colleagues made discoveries. If only research could progress so nicely and so quickly! I think most of humankind’s problems would have been solved by now if research could naturally occur at the pace it does in this novel. But, alas, as all of my colleagues in science will quickly vouchsafe, research is arduous and there are far more dead-ends than discoveries.

The stories I tell about Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Typhoid Mary, using an electric blanket on the mice to help them wake up from anesthesia better, the part about mice reacting differently to male and female handlers, the story of Koko the gorilla, the intriguing discovery of the lifecycle of Dicrocoeleum, the discoveries of the Czechoslovakian scientist who has a Toxo infection himself, and the ants, acacia and giraffe symbiosis, including the modification to this last story in later years, are all true to the best of my knowledge. And Graeter’s really is, hands down, the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

Toxoplasmosis, however, is strictly a pathogen and has never, ever been implicated in protecting someone from another infection. It is a teratogen, which means that it can cause serious birth defects to fetuses. It is transmitted through contact with cat feces, and really can linger in soil for up to a year or more. This is another reason to avoid gardening without gloves.

Also, there really are high numbers of people with undetected Toxoplasmosis infections across the world, and it has been implicated in mental illness, especially as of late. There are some really interesting articles on the web about the subject. I have put the links on my website: www.christyesmahan.com

As a way of acknowledging the contributions that so many scientists have made over time, almost every one of my characters has a last name of a scientist. I encourage my readers to look up the last names and learn about these scientific contributions, especially those Redi and Spallanzani.