ABSTRACT
The Virus was rst detected on Earth in 1935, when the
pathologist Nicolas Bulgakov (brother of the Soviet writer
Mikhail Bulgakov) was working at the Pasteur Institute,
conducting a census of organic samples collected from the
sewers of Paris. The Virus was isolated and cultured by
Bulgakov, who learned that the newly found life-form could
infect the enteric microbe E. coli. The Virus proved to be
uncannily geometric in its structure when later seen under
an electron microscope, since the Virus resembled an icosa-
hedron – a perfect, faceted capsule of protein, containing
an annular plasmid of genetic material. The Virus could
inject this package of alien genes into a host cell so as to
commandeer the metabolic machinery of the infected
organism, replicating the Virus more than one thousand-
fold, until the Virus overwhelmed its host – nally killing it.
