Harold Varmus won a Nobel prize for studying cancer viruses, and he's written an excellent piece on “28 Days Later” for the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/movies/06VARM.html
WARNING: Light Spoilers Below
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July 6, 2003
Virus as Metaphor: Microbiology and '28 Days Later'
By HAROLD VARMUS
DANNY BOYLE'S arresting and terrifying new movie, "28 Days Later," seems to make it official: microbial plagues have displaced nuclear winter in the public's mind as the way the world will end. Although written and produced before we had anthrax spores in the Senate, national debates about smallpox vaccination, searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and global anxiety about SARS, its release in this country at this time feeds on now routine fears of an unanticipated microbiological catastrophe.
Mr. Boyle's imagined catastrophe begins with a brief and hectic scene in which animal liberationists, masked like terrorists, break into a lab and release tightly caged chimpanzees who are infected with something called the "rage virus." After a brief silence and an abrupt jump to 28 days later, we learn that London is deserted and eerily quiet, Manchester is on fire and few remain alive anywhere in England.
What kind of virus is this and how could it have decimated the populace? Through the experiences of James — the bike messenger who awakens from a collision-induced coma 28 days after the animal facility break-in, then leaves his London hospital bed to wander through the nearly empty city — we learn that the behavior of the virus is unprecedented and shocking. Transmitted by even minute amounts of bodily fluid, it unfailingly produces dramatic effects within 20 seconds, transforming its victims into enraged, wild-eyed, indiscriminate killers, with superhuman athletic abilities, the capacity to survive for at least several days, and a compulsion to bite the uninfected. Under these ground rules, the few who remain uninfected do so only by killing any of the infected who get too close or by incarceration, as in a hospital. The infected, with their surprising virus-induced hyperkinesis, are every bit as frightening as the spookily revitalized ghouls in the classic horror film "Night of the Living Dead," who were allegedly transformed by radiation from a Venus space probe, an emblem of the anxieties of the 60's.
What should we make of this fictional virology? As in the tradition of horror movies, in which disbelief must be surrendered to authorial imagination, the science is far from accurate. No virus of a conventional sort can act in this way. Viruses abide by the rules of molecular biology, and it simply takes too long for a virus to grow — copy its genes, make new proteins and particles and then spread in a new host — to produce symptoms so quickly. And there is no known virus that causes disease in every infected individual. (The only curtsy to virological realism is the suggestion that the rage virus, like many known animal viruses, is apparently confined to a few closely related species — here primates, as deduced from the robust health of gracefully flying birds and blissfully galloping horses and from the contrast with violent chimps and human beings.)
The lack of microbial verisimilitude in "28 Days Later" may surprise viewers who recall the vividly accurate depiction of heroin withdrawal in Mr. Boyle's popular "Trainspotting" (1996). In that film, the hero's delirium even includes a turbulent dream about a TV quiz show whose contestants provide (correct) answers to technical questions about the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). And we are far from "Outbreak," another microbiological thriller, in which the offending virus behaves much more realistically, and the response is marshaled by certified federal agencies.
Still, despite the virological liberties of "28 Days Later," Mr. Boyle and his collaborators, including Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplay, have imbued the virus's imaginary properties with a sense of political and social purpose, giving the movie a power that exceeds what is often expected of the sci-fi horror genre. For one thing, there are the symptoms of the infected, the rage and aggression that seem so hard to explain when they surface in real life as freeway shoot-outs or acts of terrorism. And there is a linguistic link between this unconventional rage-inducing virus and the condition we call Mad Cow Disease — a disease that, incidentally, takes years or decades, not seconds, to develop after infection with atypical agents called prions.
Mr. Boyle has referred to his pathological invention as a "psychological virus." By this seductive but unscientific term he may have meant something akin to what happens to soldiers in battle — for example, as portrayed by the facial contortions in Leonardo da Vinci's remarkable sketches of Renaissance warriors displayed recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But such psychological change does not require contact with blood or anything else.
In a sense, Mr. Boyle's rage virus, with its nearly instantaneous transformation of the recipients, acts more like a powerful drug, like a poison or a narcotic. But an epidemic of drugs is only a political or social metaphor. Lacking a microorganism's capacity to multiply, a drug would soon be diluted to the point of ineffectiveness as it was passed in blood from victim to victim. Mr. Boyle has mentioned his fascination with recent news reports that the polio virus has been synthesized in a laboratory from its chemical components; but, regardless of whether such synthesis is cause for worry about terrorism, a synthetic virus would still need to duplicate in conventional ways, so it could not behave like the fictional rage virus.
The rapidity with which the rage virus is transmitted does, however, permit a story line that has both a superficially reassuring ending and a disturbing significance with respect to actual viral epidemics caused by AIDS and SARS. Despite the movie's early references to infections in Paris and New York, the possibility of a global epidemic seems slight in view of the character of the fictitious virus. Early in the outbreak, uninfected people might have escaped to distant lands, by boat or plane (or even through the Chunnel), but as the disease spread, the ubiquity of the infected would have thwarted emigration. The virus itself would have been extremely unlikely to escape Britain to infect the rest of the world because of the movie's convenient fiction (which never applies in the real world of infectious diseases): everyone who is infected gets sick — quickly and dramatically — so none of the infected could have carried the virus off the island. If any of them made it to a vehicle, the vehicle would have never departed — unless, of course, someone chose to try to import an infected person to another part of the world, under sedation or in restraints, for nefarious purposes or for scientific investigation.
But very little effort is made in the movie to understand or control the infection — just the use of conventional weapons to defend against the infected by shooting, striking and stabbing them. There is a solitary exception: one of the infected is chained to a wall, allegedly to be studied by the leader of a small band of armed survivors; but it is clear that these superficial attempts to learn from observation are only cruel and useless, perhaps an editorial comment on the futility of science under these circumstances.
As we near the end of the movie, it seems the main British Isle is effectively under global quarantine — with the sinister implication that the rest of the world likes it that way. After another 28-day interval, everyone who was infected is presumed dead, and a few exhausted, amiable survivors begin life anew in an England restored to its pastoral virginity. A crisply white small plane, dipping its wings to acknowledge a colorful "hello" spelled out in bedspreads on emerald hills, reminds us that the rest of the world, apparently spared from the epidemic, is now ready to pick up the pieces cheerfully.
However superficially soothing, there is something troubling about this comfortable conclusion. It implies that we might be better off with epidemics that can end abruptly and definitively than we are with the insidious plagues that now afflict us. Wouldn't it be simpler if we had clear knowledge of who is infected and who isn't? Or if we could eliminate the long incubation times that allow foreigners and strangers to carry their unannounced pathogens to us on planes and boats? Wouldn't it be better if we could confine AIDS and Ebola to Africa and SARS to Hong Kong, and then return to repair society once the microbial damage was done — done, of course, to others and not to us?
It is difficult to know in the midst of all the immediate terrors of "28 Days Later" what Mr. Boyle meant for us to think about such things. But it is one of the strengths of his accomplishment that it makes us think about them at all.
Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, shared a Nobel Prize for studies of cancer viruses.
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