The Cobra Event

The Cobra Event is a 1998 thriller novel by Richard Preston describing a terror attempt on the United States by a lone man, the creator of a virus, called "Cobra", that mixes the incurable common cold with one of the world's most deadly diseases, smallpox. The disease that results from the virus, called brainpox in the novel, has effects that mimic those of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and Nuclear Polyhedrosis Virus. The virus is a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent, because it is lethal to humans, is highly transmittable to humans by aerosol, and has no vaccine or cure.

Plot summary

The book is divided into 6 sections. The first section, named "Trial", starts with a teenage girl named Kate Moran who violently dies one day in school. The next section, titled "1969", describes tests done in the sixties by the U.S. government involving weaponized viruses. The third section, "Diagnosis", describes the autopsy of Kate Moran and, introduces the key characters of Dr. Alice Austen, Mark Littleberry, and Will Hopkins. The book describes these three characters' journey to discover the source of the lethal virus Cobra, in the other three sections, "Decision", "Reachdeep", and "The Operation".

"Cobra" and its effects

The specific brainpox described in the novel is a fictional disease, a chimeric virus that attacks the human brain. The pathogen that causes it, codenamed "Cobra" by the protagonists, is a recombinant virus made from the nuclear polyhedrosis virus (a moth virus), the rhinovirus, and smallpox.

It starts like a common cold, but then it invades the nervous system. Although not as contagious as the influenza virus, it is as infective as the common cold. It spreads like the common cold: by contact with tiny droplets of mucus floating in the air and contacting the eyes or lungs, or by contact with infected blood. It can be dried into powder and it can get into the air. An early symptom is a blistering process in the nose and mouth.

It is neuroinvasive—that means it travels along the nerve fibers and invades the central nervous system. It replicates in the brain. The virus moves to the brain when it attaches itself to the eyelids or to the membranes in the nose; the optic nerves and the olfactory nerves in the nose are hard-wired straight into the brain. Cobra has a very fast replication phase, killing in about two days. It amplifies explosively in the brain. The virus makes crystals in the brain cells. The crystals form in the center of the cell, in the cell's nucleus.

It damages the brain stem, the areas that control emotion and violence and feeding. Brainpox eventually causes people to attack themselves and to eat their own flesh. Specifically, the fictional Cobra virus causes the same general type of brain damage as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. Lesch-Nyhan is a real life X-linked genetic disease overwhelmingly inherited by males. Caused by damage to a single gene, it results in a bizarre manifestation of stereotyped self-injury, biting of the lips, fingers, and arms, as well as aggression directed toward other people. The Cobra virus knocks out the gene for an enzyme named hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (HGPRT), and that somehow leads to self-injury and autocannibalism. The virus engages in a massive burst of replication, just as the nuclear polyhedrosis virus does, and the last burst almost melts the human brain, triggering this wild change of behavior in the hours leading up to death.

Impact of the book

President Bill Clinton was reportedly sufficiently impressed by the terrorist scenarios recounted in the book that he asked aides and officials for closer study and suggested more funding for research into bioterror threats. However, there is some variation in the assorted accounts of this episode in his administration: about his degree of concern, who was asked to help, the depth of inquiry, the formal status of his orders, and the magnitude of expense involved. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]}

References

1. ^ "Where Terrorism Meets Optimism", Margo Nash, New York Times, 24 Nov 2002

   "President Bill Clinton asked the F.B.I. to determine whether the events described in The Cobra Event could really happen."

2. ^ Fatal Future?: Transnational Terrorism and the New Global Disorder, p. 117, footnote 2, which cites "U.S. Still Unprepared for Biological Attack", Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1998, and says

   "...Clinton's reading of Preston's novel reportedly led Clinton to issue an executive order directing drastically increased funding for research on the threat of advanced biological terrorist weapons."

3. ^ "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. (Political booknotes: plague upon us)", Washington Monthly, 1 Nov 2001; review of Germs written by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad, 2001.

   "Clinton began pushing the book on friends and fellow government officials, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and had Pentagon officials brief him on its plausibility. The response he got was not reassuring. From then on, in the words of one national security official, Clinton became "obsessed" with the threat of biological weapons."

4. ^ Our Cannibals, Ourselves, Priscilla L. Walton, p. 157, footnote 8

   "According to [Judith] Miller et al., President Clinton was so struck by the scenario depicted in The Cobra Event that he asked John Hamre, deputy secretary of defense, "whether he thought the novel's scenario was plausible. Could a terrorist unleash an unstoppable plague with designer pathogens?" (226). Subsequently, a committee was struck to investigate bioterrorist scenarios."

5. ^ Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, David C. Rapoport, p. 186

   "In April 1998, as a result of having read the Richard Preston novel, The Cobra Event, the president held a meeting with a group of scientists and Cabinet members to discuss the threat of bioterrorism. The briefing impressed Clinton so much that he asked the experts to brief senior officials in DOD and HHS. On May 6 they delivered a follow-up report, calling for the stockpiling of vaccines (an idea that was soon dropped.) The Washington Post reported with regard to the stockpiling proposal that 'Some administration officials outside the White House expressed surprise at how fast the president and his National Security Council staff had moved on the initiative .... noting with some concern that it had not gone through the customary deliberative planning process.' [11] Critics noted that not all scientific experts were disinterested; some stood to gain financially if the government invested large sums in developing technology against bioterrrorism."

   Note 11, above, is to Washington Post, 21 May 1998, p. A1.
6. ^ Furedi, F. (2007). Invitation to Terror. Expanding the Empire of the Unknown. London: Continuum.