Lou Richards sat motionless at his desk after speaking with his son. He couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he had about the outbreak in Benin that Lennox had been asked to investigate. He and his colleagues had been discussing it for the last several weeks, since the news media had begun covering the fatalities. That his son was going into harm’s way didn’t sit well with him.
His disturbed gaze flitted over numerous photos displayed on the file hutch next to his desk. He eyed one in particular—a picture of Lennox wearing his cap and gown on the day he graduated from medical school. He wore a broad smile as he stood with his mother. Thank goodness his only child had inherited his mother’s good looks, Lou thought, taking in his son’s handsome features.
Lou considered himself homely, and for the life of him, he couldn’t understand what his wife, Angie, saw in him. The lenses in his glasses were so thick that they made his eyes appear as tiny dark dots. Luckily, his son had excellent vision. Lennox had inherited his mother’s medium- brown complexion, and his nose was slightly more aquiline than Lou’s bulbous one. Lou’s face was peppered with tiny black moles, some flattened into the skin and others raised. Lennox’s skin was smooth and blemish-free. His son also had a muscular build and topped his father’s six-foot frame by two additional inches.
Lou was proud of his son. He had graduated magna cum laude in biology and chemistry and earned an MD from his alma mater, Howard University. Lennox had then gone on to complete his internship and residency in clinical pharmacology and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School. In his second year of residency, Lennox had been one of eight students chosen to receive an Applied Epidemiology Fellowship at the CDC. The fellowship gave the students hands-on training experience in studying epidemics and epidemic diseases—the field Lennox had chosen to pursue. Now, at thirty-five years old, he was a department head and becoming renowned in his field.
Sighing audibly, Lou glanced at his watch. He needed to focus his attention once more on the biobank project he was spearheading for Howard. e biobank was known as GRAD, or Genomic Research in the African Diaspora. It was to be a first-of-its-kind gene bank, gathering the genetic codes and personal family health histories of about twenty-five thousand people who identified themselves as African American. A similar project was going on with their neighbors to the south. Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica (INMEGEN) had just completed mapping genetic markers of groups in their county of indigenous and mestizo (European and American Indian) origin. Just last week, he had learned that the United Kingdom had launched the 100,000 Genomes Project, hoping to identify genetic bases for a multitude of diseases. The genomes project would provide much-needed data that would allow better clinical interpretation of the genetic code.
Blood Virus 