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FAQ ABOUT THE ISSUES IN RABID

Q. Does this kind of screwing around between professors and graduate students really happen in science labs?

A. Rarely.

It happens in English departments, where people screw around with very few consequences.

In science departments and medical schools, the atmosphere is conservative and gossipy, and this cloistered atmosphere precipitates the events of Rabid.

Rabid, A Novel, was inspired by events that happened while I was in graduate school. The Dean of the Medical School, Dr. Richard Nelson, had an affair with his secretary, Mary Jo Young, and moved out. Several months after he moved out, his wife, Mrs. Phyllis Nelson, went over to his apartment late at night, and he ended up with a knife in his chest and died from the one wound. It was the biggest crime that had happened at the University of Iowa since a disgruntled physics graduate student murdered five professors on his committee, profoundly injured an innocent secretary, and committed suicide (Gang Lu case, 1991.) Iowa does seem to be a hotbed of murder.

The Nelson trial was broadcast on CourtTV. Phyllis Nelson's defense was that the stabbing was an accident, that she picked up the knife to defend herself because Richard Nelson was verbally abusive and she feared for her safety, and that the two of them collided in a doorway and the knife accidentally went into Richard Nelson's chest. Mary Jo Young testified at the trial that she and Richard Nelson were having an affair and that they had made plans to marry. Nancy Grace, the CourtTV commentator, was very hard on Phyllis Nelson, said that Phyllis Nelson shouldn't have gone over to Richard Nelson's apartment, etc.

Phyllis Nelson was convicted. I think she got railroaded. I don't think she could have gotten a fair trial in Iowa because Dean Nelson was very popular, a very nice guy. (I didn't know him, but I know people who did.) In that case, Richard Nelson wasn't stabbed with a steak knife. It was a paring knife, the very smallest one in the block, the one so small that its job is to scrape thin skin off of fruit. It hit his left ventricle.

I changed the circumstances and characters substantially in Rabid from those in the Nelson trial but tried to keep the various community reactions and the timbre of the science department / medical school environment, which is very similar to the segregated community of a Catholic Church parish. Obviously, I was not privy to what actually happened in Richard Nelson's apartment that night nor do I know what Phyllis Nelson thought before, at the time, or after the episode. As far as I know, no priests nor graduate students were involved in the events. I do not know anything about the Nelsons' background or prior lives, nor did I try to find out. No secret experiments were discovered in Nelson's lab. There is no evidence that Nelson was having an affair with anyone other than Mary Jo Young. The Nelsons were not Catholic. While the circumstances surrounding the events in Iowa inspired my book, the Sloans are entirely fictional characters and are not to be confused with the Nelsons.

Furthermore, though their names are similar, the fictional character Conroy Sloan is not based on one of my previous professors, Frank Conroy. The name "Conroy" was just too good to pass up, so I used it.

Q. Do people conduct secret and dangerous experiments in university science labs across the country?

A. All the time.

Secret: In general, one does not discuss ongoing experiments in detail, especially ones with a low chance of success but might work, before one has results, even within a lab. Ongoing experiments are very rarely discussed with other labs unless one has a very close collaboration. Lines of experimentation are closely guarded secrets between rival labs. I've seen people try to conduct what amounts to espionage at conferences, trying to get secrets out of rival lab members, including getting people drunk or conducting sexual relationships (a "honey trap.") Comments by rival lab members are dissected in private and at length after the conference.

Dangerous: I have seen many posters presented at conferences and papers published in journals where I thought, "So that means that these guys took a blood sample from someone with an unknown disease and grew a whole bunch of virus stock out of it. It could have been Ebola or some new hemorrhagic virus, but they were lucky that it was merely, say, Hantavirus." I've also seen the results of experiments presented at meetings where people switched proteins in and out of viruses, such as adding human receptor proteins to animal viruses like PRV, Pseudorabies virus, which could result in a terrible new plague to which no one has any natural immunity. These things are joked about, because the possibility of creating a superpathogen is low, but it is possible.

It should be noted, however, that it is unlikely a grad student in a lab could create as perfect a pathogen as nature evolves every day with recombinant bird and swine influenzas, emerging pox and hemorrhagic viruses, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains.

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