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Updat­ing FTR-90, this pro­gram dis­cuss­es, among oth­er things, the bio­log­i­cal war­fare sce­nario pre­sent­ed in the nov­el Ser­pen­t’s Walk.

The book cen­ters on a Nazi takeover of the Unit­ed States by the descen­dants of the SS. Hav­ing “gone under­ground” at the end of World War II and amassed an enor­mous amount of wealth, the “under­ground SS” assume con­trol of the coun­try after a bio­log­i­cal war­fare attack by genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered micro-organ­isms wipes out much of the world’s pop­u­la­tion.

This hypo­thet­i­cal bio­log­i­cal war­fare attack uti­lizes a mil­i­tary appli­ca­tion of a genet­ic engi­neer­ing tech­nique known as gene ther­a­py. (Gene ther­a­py involves the use of a virus to inject DNA into a cel­l’s nucle­us for ther­a­peu­tic pur­pos­es. The same method­ol­o­gy can be used for lethal pur­pos­es.) In Ser­pen­t’s Walk, a genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered and plague-caus­ing organ­ism (named Pacov) is “pig­gy-backed” onto a virus and wipes out much of the pop­u­la­tion of Asia and Africa. Ulti­mate­ly, this delib­er­ate geno­cide results in ret­ri­bu­tion and con­se­quent dev­as­ta­tion of the Unit­ed States. This dev­as­ta­tion leads to the Nazi takeover.

The analy­sis pre­sent­ed in the pro­gram incor­po­rates dis­cus­sion of the SV40 virus. A can­cer-caus­ing mon­key virus that con­t­a­m­i­nates vac­cines, SV40 con­tains a dev­as­tat­ing, can­cer-caus­ing pro­tein called “large T‑antigen”. This pro­tein deac­ti­vates a gene called p53, which pre­vents can­cer by destroy­ing cells that expe­ri­ence genet­ic dam­age dur­ing mito­sis (cel­lu­lar repro­duc­tion.) The ade­n­ovirus (which caus­es the com­mon cold) also deac­ti­vates the p53 gene, and genet­i­cal­ly altered ade­n­ovirus­es are being test­ed as vehi­cles for gene ther­a­py.

This pro­gram explores the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered ade­n­ovirus could be used for the destruc­tion of the Unit­ed States.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: excerpt from Ser­pen­t’s Walk; dis­cus­sion of Hans Schw­erte (an SS offi­cer who assumed a post-war iden­ti­ty as a respect­ed uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor); Schw­erte’s wartime involve­ment in Nazi med­ical exper­i­ments on con­cen­tra­tion camp inmates; Nazi hunter Simon Wiesen­thal’s state­ment that “there are oth­er Hans Schw­ertes;” dis­cus­sion of an alleged CIA offi­cer involved in bio­log­i­cal war­fare col­lab­o­ra­tion with the apartheid regime of South Africa; dis­cus­sion of a mur­der con­spir­a­cy alleged­ly involv­ing this doc­tor; dis­cus­sion of an alleged AIDS-pre­vent­ing vagi­nal sup­pos­i­to­ry devel­oped by this doc­tor.