Author R&R with Dorian Paul
I'm taking a break this week from the regular Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature to take some Author R&R (Research and Reference) with Dorian Paul, a/k/a Dorrie Parini and Paul LaFerriere, author of the biological thriller Risking
the World. Dorrie and Paul have always finished each other's
sentences and shared an entrepreneurial passion. For nearly three decades they have
worked with Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and biotech companies to explain
breakthroughs in genetic engineering, immunology, cancer research and many
other areas. Dorrie has a BS in English and Biology and an MA in English (Penn
State) with advanced courses in science writing. Paul has a BS from Amherst
College where he studied English and Mathematics.
From Dorrie and Paul:
As our world advances, so do our
chances of coming up against catastrophic disaster and every new cure has the
potential to turn deadly. Ancient agents – the bubonic plague, smallpox, and
botulism – lie dormant in laboratories, ever ready to emerge in new,
potentially bioengineered forms. This is how the stage has been
set in Risking the World.
The heroine, American scientist
Claire Ashe, finds herself thrust into the middle of a massive terrorist plot
not even the global intelligence community is prepared for. The terror plot at
the heart of Risking the World
revolves around a rapidly lethal bioengineered form of tuberculosis designed to
purposely infect kids. The science used
to foil the horror is not only plausible, but the technology has already garnered
Nobel prizes.
Risking the World is a biological thriller. For starters, that meant we had to get the
science right for it to be plausible enough to grip and hold the reader.
On that
score we had a leg up, because we'd worked together to build a science writing
company of 100+. We'd interviewed
experts who developed cutting edge medical advances, and knew from experience
how to sift through peer-reviewed journals to find articles with a spark of
originality and promise. So, the
research tools were familiar to us.
The
challenge lay in using those tools to pluck the very best from the published
research, and extend that knowledge into unknown realms. Our aim was to create a fictional world in
which all the science we described was real, but the terrifying ways in which
it was put to use had yet to be seen.
Selecting
the right disease for our bio-threat was our first and most central research
question. We put aside writing about a
biological agent everyone's already heard of, like anthrax or plague, as old
hat. Instead, we looked for a disease
that our readers would recognize—but not think of as dangerous.
Tuberculosis
had much to offer. Book lovers might
recognize it as the disease that killed John Keats, and some might even know
that George Orwell used the royalties from 1984
to import streptomycin for his TB treatment. While these historical examples echo a
distant past, not a dangerous present, the current situation is not at all
rosy. TB ranks second only to HIV/AIDS
as the cause of death from infectious disease globally, and the WHO estimates that
as of 2010 nearly one-third of the world's population was infected with TB.
Fortunately,
most of these individuals have a latent (dormant) form of this slow growing
disease. But what if an evil genius were
to discover what our leading researchers have yet to elucidate – the secret to
the switch that turns TB's reproduction cycle on and off? Could the good guys who are investigating
protein kinases and messenger molecules be on the right track, but a step
behind the bad guys? And what if those
bad guys succeed in bio-engineering an explosively lethal form of TB that kills
just about every young kid exposed to it?
Now the
scientists in our novel who wear the white hats must play catch up, big time. The heroine, Claire Ashe, is an
immunobiologist who's spent her budding career trying to uncover the
reproductive secrets of TB in hopes of developing a viable vaccine. She's leading the team tasked with finding an
antidote to the deadly TB strain created by the man who solved the scientific
puzzle she failed to unravel – and used the knowledge to kill rather than cure.
Why
choose a brainy female as our heroine? Because we believe in promoting women in
science. You might not know this, but
even though women represent about 60% of college graduates in the U.S., men
represent about 60% of those in science.
Since women are over 50% of the U.S. population, it's time we took
advantage of all the female brainpower out there to keep our science position
in the world. Unbelievably, a UNESCO
report indicates 13 Muslim countries produce a higher percentage of women science
graduates than the U.S.
We'd
served with women like Claire on deadline driven international teams, so we
knew what she was up against as team leader.
This allowed us to populate our pages with a group of the best and
brightest – and endow them with appropriately cantankerous personalities. But the scientific team assembled in Risking the World needed to be equipped
with the right weapons to fight back – and nanotechnology fit the bill.
Nanotechnology
has garnered multiple Nobel prizes in recent years. It refers to techniques in which scientists
manipulate matter on the atomic and molecular levels to create wholly novel
structures not found in nature. Whoa,
you say, that sounds scary. Except, of
course, it's not at all scary to the scientists involved, who've named one of
their earliest creations 'Bucky Balls' after Buckminster Fuller, the inventor
of the geodesic dome. But Bucky Balls
become scary to Claire Ashe when she sees how her nemesis has used them.
Of
course, we've only touched on the science research here, but other research was
required for our villain, whose motivation lay within the world of the
personal. Even while plotting to unleash
his TB bioweapon on children in Paris, London Tel Aviv, and New York, he
remains obsessed with reconstituting his grandfather's antique weapon
collection, which was confiscated after he was murdered when the Shah of Iran
was deposed. Research relating to this
weapon collection came from the epic Persian poem, Shahnameh, as well as
collections detailed in books and visited by us at the Wallace Musuem in
London.
In the
age of the crusades, European armorers struggled to create swords that could
stand up against the watered steel blades forged by their Persian foes. In Risking
the World, evil scientists use nanotechnology to create a protective shell
for their lethal TB. Claire's team,
seeking a cure, uses it to penetrate those defenses. Scientists such as Claire
are the modern day armorers, waging war at the molecular level on our behalf.
We hope
you take a risk on Risking the World
by Dorian Paul. It is available through
Amazon.com as an eBook and trade paperback.
For more information about us, and the science behind Risking the World, visit our website at
www.dorianpaul.com.
Risking the World
is available in print and ebook format from Amazon.com. Your purchase of Risking the World helps support TB research via contributions by Dorian Paul, who donates a portion of the revenue from book sales to organizations fighting this deadly disease.
