A popular thriller, but a serious point to it. Is the baddie a baddie at all? The baddie is about to release a virus which will spread rapidly through the world’s population, infecting people with a stretch of DNA which will make most people sterile, thus solving the world’s population problem. The baddie will get nothing out of it.
Brown has only a shaky understanding of the biological terminology, but the idea is technically possible. Before I retired, I worked at an Australian research organization, and about the early nineties I heard of a project to control our wild fox problem by infecting foxes with a virus (I think) which would make them sterile. This was seen as a humane way of controlling thee wild fox problem, compared with trapping or shooting them.
When I heard about the project, I wondered whether a version of this idea would work in India or China, on people. Brown uses the term ‘vector virus’ when he should have used ‘retro virus’. A retro virus enters cells of the host’s body and hijacks the cell machinery to make copies of itself. Retro viruses often do not copy themselves, but insert their DNA into the cell’s DNA
He also overestimates the ability of polymerase chain reaction to identify the virus in the book.
If you are interested, google ‘foxes immuno sterilization’ to get more information.