SCIENCE sciencemag.org
INSIGHTSThe War of the Worlds, fictional fears of cos-
mic pandemics—like those Michael Crichton
described in The Andromeda Strain in 1969—
are not new to the world of science. On the
day after the famed 1975 Asilomar Confer-
ence addressing the potential biohazards of
recombinant DNA research, the Boston Globe
trumpeted on its front page: “Scientists to
Resume Risky Work on Genes: Danger of
‘Andromeda Strain’ Posed” ( 6 ). And in the
years that followed, narratives about alien-
induced pandemics repeatedly intruded into
conversations on Capitol Hill about appro-
priate laboratory biocontainment strategies
for newly engineered organisms.
While many might (and did) deride such
references to intergalactic fiction as mere
sensationalism, these sorts of invocations—
framing legislative responses within not
only the language of science but also that
of science fiction—suggest that we would do
well to seek to understand the unexpected
and sometimes unruly cultural narratives in
which science is always situated.
“Plague came to Whileaway in P.C. 17 (Pre-
ceding Catastrophe) and ended in A.C. 03,
with half the population dead,” wrote Joanna
Russ in 1975 in The Female Man, a brilliant
feminist novel that deploys plague and tinc-
tures of time as part of a larger critique of
gender essentialism ( 7 ). The plague “started
so slowly that no one knew about it until
it was too late. It attacked males only.” But
what need is there of such fictions of plague
when the future itself is terrifying enough?
Climate change will bring about new
plagues, asserted David Wallace-Wells in
2019 in The Uninhabitable Earth. “[T]here
are the plagues that climate change will
confront us with for the very first time—
a whole new universe of diseases humans
have never before known to even worry
about. ‘New universe’ is not hyperbole. Sci-
entists guess the planet could harbor more
than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses”
( 8 ). The effects of even one of these viruses
run amok could be dire, he envisioned (as
we are now experiencing). In the face of
climate change, Wallace-Wells predicts “the
global halving of economic resources would
be permanent...a brutally cruel normal
against which we might measure tiny burps
of decimal-point growth as the breath of a
new prosperity...in economic terms, a Great
Dying.” Another great dying, except this
time, a villa in Tuscany offers no refuge.
As unprotected heroes head into hospi-
tals and supermarkets, many of the rest of
us pass unending challenging days at home,
echoing the weary, entrapped, plague-
addled world of Samuel Delany’s 1975 novel
Dhalgren: “ You do know how terrible it is
to live inside here...with everything slip-
ping away?...This has got to stop, you know!
Management must be having all sorts of dif-
ficulty while we’re going through this crisis.
I understand that. I make allowances. But
it’s not as though a bomb had fallen, or any-
thing. If a bomb had fallen, we’d be dead.
This is something perfectly natural. And we
have to make do, don’t we, until the situa-
tion is rectified?” ( 9 ).
“The existential inconvenience of corona-
virus,” as Geoff Dyer described our moment
in the New Yorker in March ( 10 ), alludes to
Jean-Paul Sartre’s truth that in a time of
existential crisis, “hell is other people” ( 11 ).
But our ability to physically distance while
remaining socially connected through social
media has also brought forth playful paral-
lels offering poignant critique: “We all have
Schrödinger’s virus now,” wrote one Mat
Krahn, now enjoying his 15 minutes of Face-
book fame. “Because we cannot get tested,
we can’t know whether we have the virus or
not. We have to act as if we have the virus so
that we don’t spread it to others. We have to
act as if we’ve never had the virus because if
we didn’t have it, we’re not immune. There-
fore, we both have and don’t have the virus.
Thus, Schrödinger’s virus” ( 12 ).
Historians tell us that there is a rhythm
to life and death, not only for individuals
but also for societies. “Epidemics start at a
moment in time, proceed on a stage limited
in space and duration, follow a plot line of
increasing and revelatory tension, move to
a crisis of individual and collective charac-
ter, then drift toward closure,” the historian
of medicine Charles Rosenberg has written
( 13 ). As laboratory workers pursue promis-
ing leads, and the battle between “freedom
from” and “freedom to” plays out in coun-
tries around the world, we might even turn
to Emily Dickinson, who—in the tiniest tinc-
ture of all—queries whether our political
leaders will finally recognize the urgencies
of the moment: “FAITH is a fine invention /
For Gentlemen who see! / But Microscopes
are prudent / In an Emergency!” ( 14 ). jREFERENCES AND NOTES- G. Boccaccio, Decameron (ca. 1349).
- D. Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).
- J. Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).
- S. Sontag, “The way we live now,” New Yorker, 24 November
- N. Shute, On the Beach (Heinemann, 1957).
6.Boston Globe, 28 February 1975, p. 1. - J. Russ, The Female Man (Bantam Books, 1975).
- D. Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (Tim Duggan
Books, 2019). - S. Delany, Dhalgren (Bantam Books, 1975).
- G. Dyer, “The existential inconvenience of coronavirus,”
New Yorker, 23 March 2020. - J.-P. Sartre, No Exit (Huis Clos) (1944).
- Mat Krahn, Facebook, 30 March 2020; http://www.facebook.
com/mat.krahn/posts/3076953808995462. - C. Rosenberg, Daedalus 118 , 1 (1989).
- E. Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
(Little, Brown, 1924).
10.1126/science.abc1732Congratulations
to the 2019
Winners
The Golden Goose Award
honors federally funded
researchers whose work
may have seemed odd
or obscure when it was
conducted but which led to
major breakthroughs and
signifcant societal beneft.
Nominations are now
being accepted.
http://www.goldengooseaward.orgDavid Sachar
The Frog Skin that
Saved 50 Million LivesNoel Rose and
Ernest Witebsky
Advancing
AutoimmunityJack Levin and
Frederik Bang
The Blood of the
Horseshoe Crabjixiansheng