Culture of epidemics

New diseases have inspired numerous works of fiction.

In '28 Days Later' (2002), a man wakes from a coma to find central London deserted. He eventually encounters a group of survivors living in fear of crazed zombies infected by a virus released when animal activists attack a primate research facility. The virus has wiped out most of the population of Europe.

The shots of a deserted, windswept London are genuinely eerie, though the zombies are fairly typical flesh-eating monsters. A deadly virus is also the villain in 'Twelve Monkeys' (1995), which also throws in a bit of time travel - a convict is sent back from 2036 to 1996 to uncover the origins of a virus that kills 5 billion people.

In 'Outbreak' (1995), by contrast, Dustin Hoffman rides to the rescue, single-handedly preventing a pandemic hitting the USA. An African monkey harbouring a deadly Ebola-like virus is smuggled into the USA. An outbreak strikes a California town and it is a race against time to develop an antidote before a bomb is dropped on the town to halt the spread of the virus.

The film illustrates some interesting aspects of disease control, but is marred by the usual Hollywood clichés - the bad guy who wants to use the virus as a biological weapon, the inevitable reconciliation between Hoffman and his estranged wife, the cliff-hanger happy ending. Purists will wince as Hoffman looks down an ordinary light microscope and seems something suspiciously like the Ebola virus…

In the 1950s and 1960s, 'atomic radiation' was the symbolic 'technology out of control', creating destructive forces such as Godzilla (1954). In recent decades, biological agents - particularly viruses - have assumed this role.A forerunner of this genre was 'The Andromeda Strain' (1971) - though, this being the Space Age, the deadly agent is brought back from space. Interestingly, the core of the story rests on the scientific analysis of the alien strain in order to find an antidote - a surprisingly realistic depiction of the process of science.

'The Andromeda Strain' was written by Michael Crichton, who was also responsible for 'Prey' (2002), in which swarms of nanobots reduce living matter to the fabled 'grey goo'. So the emerging threat is post-biological - machines that act like infections. If 'The Andromeda Strain' is admired for its scientific realism, the same cannot be said of 'Prey', which was widely criticised for its misleading representations of nanobots (see Big Picture on Nanoscience).