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 ...
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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.
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...
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