[Venusian Broon]

Originally Posted by James Coote

What are the heroes going to do in the unlikely scenario they actually find him? Kill him, and lose the person best qualified to reverse the zombie disease? Persuade him? What if he says no? He's had 15 years to manufacture and distribute the cure. If he hasn't already, why not? and what are the heroes going to bring to the table to change that?

In The White Plague, the molecular biologist who cooked up the plague deliberately made himself and his expertise available (I think they didn't suspect he did it at first - must be the only way that this logically makes sense) so that he would be involved in attempts to cure it - and he would be there ready to sabotage the attempt.

However I agree that a zombie plague does make a lot of things much more difficult, if the infected are going about attacking the uninfected.

How lax is bio-security at this lab?

C'mon this is fiction! Anyway in real life didn't a researcher in the US biological warfare research division allegedly mailed out anthrax, killing people, a few years ago. I say allegedly because he was never charged as he comitted suicide before they could. That's pretty lax bio-security.

This guy's coworkers, they can't be smart enough to be working on a cure for cancer if they can't spot the same things as this guy (the same potential to turn the current cure into a zombie disease). They can't spot, when the disease starts spreading, that it might be related to their work?

Curing cancer and turning people into zombies I don't think would be really on anyone's mind, as people working on novel cancer cures would be thinking solely on cellular processes. However if the zombie disease was an unforseen consequence of the antaognist tweaking the cure to do something negative then I'd buy that.

As Kamosis says, how is he going to hide this work from his coworkers?...Management might be suspicious if they think he's using their funding to do other work on the sly

I'd go with psychotick's suggestion that he's doing it DIY outside a lab. Believe me, had loads of bio-chem PhD friends at my time in uni, and the pace of change in this fields is quite frankly unbelieveable, they tell me. You can do things with thousands of pounds worth of kit that take an afternoon that ten years ago would have cost a lab millions and taken three years.

Also, if this scientist is working to cure cancer, and he's pretty close, why would he risk it all to resolve some petty dispute from years ago?

This is a very valid point - I think for someone to be bad and psychotic enough to brew a very nasty disease, because of some past experience - then it has to be a very powerfully negative experience.

Maybe abducted and tortured by a sadistic paedophile group when a child or perhaps homeschooled and kept away from the public by very cruel, sadistic set of parents/foster (sort of like the tooth fairy in Red Dragon)