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Affirmative Actions: A short-short story about bioterrorism

Lee’s father worked horrendous hours in a restaurant. That, plus a desire to use his natural math and science ability to help humankind made Lee one of the few kids in high school who knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a scientist. Lee even knew what he wanted to specialize in: infectious diseases, because a few of his relatives had died in China’s 1946 bubonic plague epidemic.

Fueled by that and by an angry, Type A personality, Lee worked with fervor to get top grades in high school and got into MIT. He continued to work tirelessly and got into U.C. Berkeley’s prestigious PhD program in infectious diseases and vaccinology. Again, working prodigiously, even sometimes frantically, he had three journal articles published before he finished his degree. And there was no dabbling. All three articles were on his specialization: mutated bioweapons and vaccine creation.

So it was no surprise that Lee landed a tenure-track professorship, although his options were constrained because his wife got a great job offer in Dallas. So he took a position at Texas State University at Bluffview. She reassured him, “Hey, that’s so close to Dallas’s international airport, that we can easily travel anywhere.”

Not surprisingly, Lee worked hard and well both at his teaching and his research and so when it came time for his tenure review, he was confident. Alas, two professors came up for tenure in his department that year and for budget and political reasons, only one could be granted tenure. It was granted to the other person whom Lee deemed "vastly inferior," whom he believed got tenure for “non-merit reasons.”

When a person doesn’t get tenure, they lose their job: It’s up or out. And so Lee was well aware that his career was likely doomed. There are very few tenurable professorships, especially for people whose gender and race is “overrepresented.” And because there are so many applicants wielding prestigious PhDs and even post-docs, he’d have a particularly hard time. He'd have to convince a university to hire someone who was denied tenure at the Texas State University at Bluffview.

During Lee’s final semester, in one of his various efforts to deflect his fury, he experimented in his lab with creating mutated bioweapons, not that he planned to use them but it somehow felt good, in the way that some kids play sports to let off steam. Indeed, by the end of the semester, Lee had created vials-full of airborne, highly communicable mutated virus. And just to be safe, he created a vial of vaccine.

After his final semester was over, Lee was no calmer. Indeed, his anger grew. It hurt when had to walk his possessions out past the office of the professor who had gotten what he deeply felt was his tenure position. And he got angrier and angrier as the fears about his job prospects were confirmed.

Then, one day, before leaving home for his usual errands, he injected himself with the vaccine. Next, as usual, he stopped for gas, he went to the supermarket, but then he added the short ride to Dallas’s international airport. He parked near the furthest shuttle-bus stop in the parking lot, taking his attaché case with him. When the full-sized bus arrived, he was first on and sat in the furthest back, least convenient seat so his release of the mutated bioweapon would be least likely to be noticed.

At each stop, the bus filled with more people. A minute before arriving at the terminal, he opened his attaché, its cover blocking anyone from seeing, and opened the Tupperware container, which released millions of the bioweapon viruses into the bus’s air. By the time the bus arrived at the terminal, all the passengers had breathed more than enough to become fatally infected and would then infect countless people in the terminal, on the plane, and in all the cities and towns, worldwide, they were flying to.

Lee walked with the others into the terminal, went to the bathroom to further blend in, then turned around, waited for the shuttle bus, returned to his car and went home.

By the time, first symptoms appeared 10 days later, those 30 passengers had flown all over the world and with each sneeze or cough had released communicable bioweapon. Within a month, millions of people were infected. Because the virus had been mutated, there was no vaccine. So most of them died. Infectious disease specialists couldn’t even identify the outbreak’s origin because people in many locales all around the world showed symptoms at essentially the same time.

As stories of the deaths and potential Armageddon dominated all thought, Lee’s guilt grew and he told his wife that he was the cause. For a moment, her love for him made her hesitate but she then called the police, and he didn't try to stop her. 

I read this on YouTube. 

Afterword: I have consulted with a former CIA operative who said that this scenario is a type that “keeps the CIA up at night.” I am ignorant of how to manufacture or disperse bioweapons and deliberately have not even attempted here to guess how it could be done. So this story should pose no threat to the public, certainly far less than the hundreds of book-length novels--Amazon’s Goodreads alone lists a top 100--plus the many non-fiction books and articles that have been written about bioterrorism. But lest we focus on such very long-term existential threats, e.g., climate change, it might be wiser to focus on Armageddon threats that could occur this very day.

12 Predictions for 2050

As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I make 12 predictions for 2050.

Marty Nemko Returns to The Commonwealth Club. Six Big Societal Problems and Possible Solutions: health care, jobs, terrorism, education, U.S. debt.

I'm flattered that the Commonwealth Club has asked me back for my ninth appearance. In this one, I try to tackle six big societal problems: health care, jobs, terrorism, education,  and U.S. debt, It's a public event and here is the page for info and tickets.

What I'd Say to the United Nations

If I were to give a talk to the United Nations in light of the coming regime change in Egypt, here is what I would say:

The lack of well-paying jobs, especially in countries that are subject to political and religious extremism, for example, Egypt, will result in continued increases in terrorism.

Those increases will engender ever greater risk of worldwide cataclysm as weapons of mass destruction become ever more miniaturized.

Think, for example, what would happen if a terrorist released a vial of highly communicable deadly smallpox in an international airport check-in area. (That's before the TSA screening.) Or a terrorist in one of the millions of trucks that visit crowded downtowns detonated a suitcase- or larger nuclear or radiologic device.

The solutions are:

1. We must talk with terrorist organizations. Engagement has a better risk/reward ratio than vilification. More important,

2. We must be far smarter in how we spend our money. We currently spend fortunes far in excess of their likely benefit on, for example, military adventurism, stopping airline shoe bombers, space exploration, politically popular social programs known not to work, and dubious schemes to try to cool the planet.

We must redirect that spending to efforts far more likely to improve humankind, for example:

• teaching entrepreneurship (the key to creating jobs)
• encouraging an Assistance Army, in which people are encouraged to hire assistants: new-parent helpers, parenting coaches, homework helpers, personal assistants, companions for the elderly, etc.
• decreasing people's belief in materialism. There will no doubt be times when there are not enough well-paying jobs to go around. People need to realize that materialism, even the holding of private property, is not key to the life well-led. In the end, kindness, productivity, and simple pleasures are more central.
  
• the primacy of ethics. Regarding the latter, everyone must be taught again and again, through adults' actions as well as their words, that all of us must consider, before undertaking any action, what's best, not just for us, but for humankind.

Even as I write this, I worry that perhaps I'm overestimating the potential for the full range of humankind to behave according to universal wisdom. After all, I must admit that typically, my behavior is altruistic only as long as it doesn't hurt me. Too often, I forgo the unpleasant altruistic act. Occasionally, my behavior is even mildly malevolent, as when I sneer at a driver who's driving only at the speed limit unlike my usual 10 mph over.

But I prefer to err on the side of optimism. So I would like to close by stipulating to my proposed solutions being very difficult to implement although perhaps not as difficult as the effort to cool the planet. But I believe the results, even if imperfect, would do more to improve the lives of humankind than anything else, yes, anything else. Certainly, my plan is far better than what we're currently doing. Should we begin?