![]() ![]() The head of the CDC’s Special Pathogens Branch, Dr. The researchers at the station have access to various areas using implanted identity chips, like my cats have. ![]() I’m sure we’ll find out in future episodes. How would they get all that shit up there?” Larry wondered. “ How would you build it? There are no roads, no ships. My husband Larry, a PhD chemist who does some mining work and knows about things like geography and geology, pointed out that such a lab, given the map shown, would either be land and part of Canada, Russia, or Greenland, or ice and prone to sinking when things warm up a bit. I don’t recall ever reading about that pathway.Īnyway, the facility is in the part of the Arctic that is international so the FDA can’t institute those pesky regulations. This developmental anomaly, we are told, is due to a defect in signal transduction. Whatever the virus’s identity, it apparently causes rodents to develop without sex organs, and then to frantically hump one another. The reference goes by quickly, so perhaps the biologists in the audience won’t think of ELISA, the common technique to detect molecules that elicit an immune response. Then someone suggests it is an Elisa virus, which I chalked up to being an intentional nerd joke. But soon a character states, “ We have no idea what this thing is.” At first they call it a retrovirus, and how this is determined from a bunch of dead bodies and an oozing live one isn’t clear. Like in Inferno, the protagonists in Helix know right away that they’re dealing with a viral pathogen, but are confused over the identity. A minor character refers to it as “big pharma,” but a lab under ice with a few dozen people running around isn’t like a huge corporate campus in New Jersey. This inevitably leads to breaking Isaac Asimov’s rule: change one thing.Īs Helix opens, a contagion is spreading in the lab facilities of mysterious underground biotech company Arctic Biosystems. ![]() But why can’t they take the trouble to get details right? The plots of medical thrillers like Inferno and science fiction like Helix can fail when writers change or oversimplify scientific facts. My gripe isn’t that popular fiction and TV base plots on science, that’s great. However I liked Helix, mostly because the first episode ended with the best shower scene since Norman Bates offed Janet Leigh in Psycho. It’s another escaped-virus situation, but with a less creative setting than Inferno’s eerie indoor lagoon. But Inferno earns an A- in originality compared to the SyFy TV series Helixthat debuted last Friday night, January 10. Last week I trashed Dan Brown’s Inferno for its poor use of science in the plot. ![]()
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