The Andromeda Strain "Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon

and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own." This is a quote from the book The Andromeda Strain. The Andromeda Strain is a book about an extraterrestrial organism that wiped out a whole town except for an old man and a baby. The organism known as the Andromeda Strain mutates every growth cycle. They found out why the two people did not die; it was because the pH in the two people's bodies were abnormal. By that time, it had mutated and degraded the containment it was in and had escaped. It had triggered the self-destruct mechanism. They realized that the organism would benefit from this, so they stopped the bomb. Later, it mutated and became a non-lethal organism. The Andromeda strain is much like a virus. For example, they are infectious diseases that replicate or grow. They both mutate as well. However, viruses can also transfer in many ways such as: skin to skin, blood, through the air, and through saliva. On the other hand, the Andromeda strain is only airborne. Viruses has a piece of nucleic acid (either RNA or DNA). The Andromeda strain neither contains the macromolecules nucleic acid nor protein. Then again it may contain proteins or nucleic acids that are not recognized because they are not from this planet. The Andromeda strain is larger than a virus. In fact, it is the size of a small cell. Although they have their similarities, they are more different than they are the same. In trying to treat the Andromeda strain, they made some very crucial errors. First, at the beginning when they killed the vultures they failed to do necropsy on them. If they would have done the necropsy, an autopsy for animals, they could have found

out that it cannot be transferred corpse to living organism. Secondly, when Hall was examining the baby and the old man, he did not check for everything. He only checked fifteen to twenty. Secondly, Burton did not perform a necropsy on the animals that had the anti-clogging drug in them. Instead he went back to the dead rhesus monkey and the black Norwegian rat that were exposed when the satellite came to Level V. A third error was when there was a page that was between the bell and striker and made the bell not ring and MCN transmissions were not recorded, and they did not get some important teleprinter messages. The Wildfire team did not follow Koch's postulates. See, it says that you should isolate the organism. They did not do this. In chapter 16, it states, "But practically speaking they still had to isolate it, understand it, and find a cure." They did follow this part of Koch's postulates.In chapter 18, it tells of how Stone saw a "colony" of them. The second part says that they infect a healthy animal to recreate the disease. They definitely did this part. They infected two or so rhesus monkeys and five or six black Norwegian rats. The last step is to isolate the newly infected organism and compared it to the originally infected one. I don't think they could do this because the neither the original surviving organisms (the humans at Piedmont) nor the infected animals lived long enough to be observed that much, but they died about the same. The Odd Man Hypothesis is, by definition, "states that unmarried men are better able to execute the best, most dispassionate decisions in crises." So simply stated, they make the hardest decisions because they don't have a family. Mark Hall was the odd man. He was the only one out of the team that did not have a wife. Jeremy Stone never really thought that

much of Hall even from the beginning as read in chapter 5. It says "Hall had been a compromise candidate...and the choice of the surgeon instead had been made with great reluctance." Even later on in the book (chapter 25), Stone states, "I wish...that we'd brought a physical chemist along on the team." It is understood that he meant 'instead of Hall.' It isn't until about the middle of chapter 26 to chapter 30 that Stone starts to, in a sense, warm up to Hall for two reasons: Hall realized why it killed all those people and he saved everyone's life. Stone even congratulated him when it was all said and done.It's not an actual friendship more of an understanding or a mutual goal. In essence, this book was intriguing. I liked it. I somewhat had to do with what we learned recently (including: pH, characteristics of life, and macromolecules.). To think, They went through all this trouble because of organisms, similar to a virus, about one hundred trillionth our size. They tried to understand it, but missed key components in the process. For the most part they followed Koch's postulates. I believe that they did it for another reason, the reason there are colleges and universities. I believe they did it to learn and understand. "And as for us down here, we understand what's happening now, in terms of the mutations. That's the important thing. That we understand." -Jeremy Stone