From: jen@athena.mit.edu (Jennifer Hawthorne)
Subject: Re: DS9:  "Babel" - Comments      **SPOILERS**
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 23:16:54 GMT

In article <1k18nhINNobe@MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU> randall-joshua@yale.edu (Joshua E. Randall) writes:
>Spoilers for DS9 episode "Babel"
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>About the virus:  how was it able to affect all sorts of
>different species in the same way?  I mean, here on Earth,
>we have many different species living together (i.e. humans
>and their pets, mostly cats and dogs) and the only disease
>they share is rabies.  Is this yet another case of the ST
>writers not knowing enough science, or am *I* the one who
>doesn't know enough science?

Well, a little of both, probably, but for the writers I can make
excuses. (As for you, you'll have to make your own...;-)  First of
all, rabies is not the only disease that man and animals share; there
is a whole class of them. The medical term for a multi-species disease
is a "zoonose", I believe (I hope I remembered that right.)  There is
also a class of diseases that affect multiple species, but in
different ways.  (i.e. animals may carry it or suffer only lightly
from it while humans die; like bubonic plague.)  

As for the virus the way it was dealt with in Babel -- well, on the
surface of it it does look improbable. But it's certainly not
impossible.  There are two easy ways to justify it that I can come up
with offhand. First, it was a *designed* virus; this can cover a
multitude of sins.  If it was designed to essentially kill everyone on
the station, the genegineer who built it probably didn't want it to be
too species-sepcific or the impact would be blunted (yes, I know it
was targeted primarily at the Cardassians, but if the terrorists are
sufficiently brutal (and the Bajoran terrorists could well be, from
what we've seen)  they might just have decided that everyone on the
station needed to die, species irrelevant.  Also, the virus was
described at one point as using a "shifting antigen" or something
similar; this is, surprisingly enough, a real biological term that
actually makes sense in the context.  In real life, several known
viruses are perfectly capable of shifting host-specificity by shifting
surface antigens.  This not only _could_ happen, it _does_ happen.
It's not amazingly common, but it exists.  

The other easy back door explanation uses the "Preservers" idea that
was presented in TOS to explain why the Enterprise found a planet full
of American Indians way out in the middle of unknown space.  It's
semi-canon in the Star Trek Universe that the reason there are so many
humanoid races out there who look so much like us (with or without
forehead bumbps :-) is that there was an older race existing in the
galaxy before we came along, and they went around "seeding" a large
number of M-class planets with the same basic type of life.  If you
accept this as true, then it would explain why a large number of
humanoid species might be laid low by the same virus; if the virus
operates on some basic biochemical principal that all the humanoid
races have in common, it would get all of them in basically the same
fashion.  

As a real world analog, there are several hundred distinct species of
dogs out there in the world, and they look _very_ different from one
another.  But canine distemper affects them all the same. (Actually I
don't know for sure if canine distermper is a viral disease or not, so
if there are any vets out there reading this, please don't flame me.)

>Also, someone was complaining that no one died in this
>episode.  Well, maybe.  But in one scene we say some
>orderlies wheeling a body out on a gurney...is this guy dead
>or what?  Also, the panicky ship captain says that he *and*
>his crew are leaving, yet we only see Odo drag the captain
>off the ship.  I guess the rest of the crew got vaporized?

That was me complaining about no one dying.  First of all, if the guy
on the gurney was dead I submit that they would probably have thrown a
tarp over him or something.  Second, the panicky captain's crew was
NOT on the ship when it blew up -- they had been stricken with the
virus and were almost certainly in the sick ward with all the other
victims.  Go watch your tape again. :-)

I stand by my statement that not a single person died in this episode.

Jen Hawthorne (Trek BioTech Commentator Ad Nauseum)



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