Inferno Spoil Story

I suggest you read the book first, and then come back to read the rest of this review. Transhumanism: biologically engineering ourselves Remember, in a Dan Brown thriller, things are never what they seem. Did Zobrist really create a plague to kill people or was he an eugenic idealist in the Julian Huxley model? As Elizabeth Sinskey, Director of the World Health Organization (WHO), explains to Langdon, “[Transhumanism] is an intellectual movement, a philosophy of sorts, and it’s quickly taking root in the scientific community. It essentially states that humans should use technology to transcend the weaknesses inherent in our human bodies. In other words, the next step in human evolution should be that we begin biologically engineering ourselves.” Zobrist agreed, and wanted to curb the world’s population to healthy levels, but without killing people.* So instead of using a plague, he created an airborne virus that permanently modifies the DNA in human cells, but without killing the cell. Nobody gets sick, but the virus makes one person in three infertile — the  “optimal” ratio calculated by Zobrist.   A viral vector for global genetic modification   “[Zobrist] created something known as a “viral vector,” explains Brooks, the doctor who helps Langdon evade his killers at the beginning — a former child prodigy with an off-the-charts IQ and a committed transhumanist.   “It’s a virus intentionally designed to install genetic information into the cell it’s attacking,” she says. A vector virus … rather than killing its host cell … inserts a piece of predetermined DNA into that cell, essentially modifying the cell’s genome.   “An airborne viral vector is a quantum leap — years ahead of its time. Bertrand has suddenly lifted us out of the dark ages of genetic engineering and launched us headlong into the future. He has unlocked the evolutionary process and given humankind the ability to redefine our species in broad, sweeping strokes. Pandora is out of the box, and there’s no putting her back in. Bertrand has created the keys to modify the human race.“   It turns out that Zobrist’s released his virus a week before the events. And the momentous event announced by Zobrist’s hermetic hints was not the release of the virus, but its global saturation date. Airborne and extremely contagious, the virus has already infected the entire population of the planet and genetically modified everyone. There is no return.