Christy Esmahan

THE LAPTEV VIRUS

A Novel

For Dr. John R. Stevenson, and in memory of Drs. Donald C. Cox, Robert J. Brady and Jnanendra K. Bhattacharjee. They were truly outstanding Microbiology professors, my mentors whom I hold fondly in my heart

“Strange things are slumbering in the permafrost—and some of them are able to wake up”

—Veronique Greenwood

PROLOGUE

On March 3, 2014, Geoffrey Mohan from the Los Angeles Times reported:

A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.

The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appears to belong to a new family of [giant viruses] that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from different periods,” said the study’s lead author, microbiologist Professor Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University in France.

“We know that those non-dangerous viruses are alive there, which is probably telling us that the dangerous kind that may infect humans and animals - that we think were eradicated from the surface of earth - are actually still present and [could be] eventually viable, in the [frozen] ground,” Claverie said.

With global warming making northern reaches more accessible, the chance of disturbing dormant human pathogens is increased, the researchers concluded.

Average surface temperatures in the area that contained the virus have increased more steeply than in more temperate latitudes, the researchers noted.

“People will go there; they will settle there, and they will start mining and drilling,” Claverie said. “Human activities are going to perturb layers that have been dormant for 3 million years and may contain viruses.”

[…] Claverie’s laboratory was behind the discovery in Chile, more than a decade ago, of the first giant DNA virus, dubbed [Megavirus chilensis]. They next identified a far larger virus of an entirely different family in 2011, dubbing it Pandoravirus salinus, in homage to the mythical Pandora’s box that first unleashed evil on the world.

This time, they used an amoeba common to soil and water as bait to draw out a virus from a Siberian permafrost core that had been dated to 30,000 years ago.

The finding described on Monday looked like another Pandora, but it was 50 percent larger.

CHAPTER 1