My name doesn’t interest anyone, but I should be the most famous man on the planet. You can call me YK. I was born in Japan. My father was a successful businessman, but a lousy father who mistreated my mother and me psychologically. I don’t have excellent memories of him, but he pays me a scientific education and a career. My mother was a typical Japanese wife, submissive and a good housemother.
My father’s father was a kamikaze pilot in the war. He died for nothing. The empire collapsed just a year after it was shot down in the Pacific. I never knew if he really sunk an aircraft carrier or was shot down in the attempt.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was a scientist who did help in the war. If there is anyone in the world that I admire, it is him. He worked as a chief scientist in unit 731 in Korea. It was the Department of Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification of the Kwantung Army.
My grandfather organised a secret research group, the «Tōgō Unit», for chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. He worked on fleas to spread diseases in the enemy. He was probably inspired by the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It was quite successful but did not lead to the Japanese victory. After the defeat he gave himself up to the Americans and had a kind of immunity by collaborating with the enemy. It was thanks to him that my parents were able to progress in the hard years of the post-war period. It wasn’t my father who educated me; it was my grandfather.
Today I am a virologist on leave from the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA) and the University of Tokyo (Japan). I no longer do research and live apart in a beautiful villa in Florida, without contact with anyone. I can’t talk to the media, and they keep me in the dark.
I have always wanted to create the perfect virus. The super virus that is impossible to exterminate and that spreads faster than my grandfather’s fleas. So he bet on the Yersinia pestis bacteria. He never knew the power of viruses instead of bacteria.
I have kept my work secret, with just the right publications to keep my job at the university. In 2012, I published a study in the journal Nature that showed I had managed to modify the H5N1 avian flu virus to spread among ferrets. This paper has created a controversy against me. The journal Science published
«But by allowing the bird virus to spread more easily among mammals, the experiments generated fears that the pathogen could jump to humans. And critics of the work were concerned that such an improved virus could cause a pandemic if it escaped from a laboratory or was intentionally released by a bioterrorist.
I wanted scientific recognition and what I found were obscurantism and fear. I was almost fired from the university. But this did not make me lose faith in my work. In 2014, The Independent revealed that it had genetically engineered the 2009 pandemic (H1N1) flu strain so that it could «‘escape’ the immune system’s neutralising antibodies.
I tried to explain that «through the design of new viruses resistant to the immune system» they had identified «key elements that favour the spread of N1H1 in humans, in order to advance its containment».
I received a lot of criticism from scientific colleagues. I tried to explain my experiments to a small group of virologists, but one or more of them betrayed me. The Independent brought this information to light, and the «horrified» comments of the virologists consulted. They believed that the effects of my study would be far greater than those caused by the great Spanish flu of 1918, which killed between 50 and 100 million people in just one year.
I had to justify my work again with an email explaining that my research is aimed at discovering how the virus could mutate in the future. I also demonstrated that I had presented my discovery to a committee of the World Health Organization (WHO), «which received it very well».
I had made many enemies, especially Oxford University professor and former president of the Royal London Society for the Advancement of Science, Lord Robert May. He went so far as to publish that «The work you are doing is truly insane». And so I earned my reputation as a mad scientist.
So much controversy was beneficial to me in the long run. A special organisation that I will not mention contacted me to continue my experiments in a unique laboratory. By special I mean secret; with unlimited funds and a particular alignment with my ideas: Getting the super virus.
So I moved forward very quickly. I managed to modify the H5N1 virus and fused it with the HIV virus to create the coronavirus. It was a work of art, a piece of jewellery capable of multiplying at a dizzying speed. I am very proud of my creation.
Continuing my job, I was able to create variants of the virus: the military one with a 30% lethality, the highly contagious but not so lethal one and the hidden one; the asymptomatic. I found that a small change in the genome meant that the infected person had no symptoms but was super contagious. A great idea. Those infected would live a normal life and spread the disease to everyone they came in contact with. A pandemic cannot be stopped if the carriers do not have symptoms.
Just when I reported my results, I was taken off the project. From one day to the next, I was retired, without notice.
Now I live in this village in Florida, with everything I could wish for, but without the freedom to continue working and with the prohibition of all contact with the outside world. All my emails are censored, and they have even put a filter so that I cannot do free searches on the net.
After a few months, I knew why. My work was released to the general public. Everyone will Remember the coronavirus, but no one will ever know that I was its father.