71 Lisa Lynch Literature and Medicine 20, no. 1 (Spring 2001) 71–93 © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press “Not a Virus, but an Upgrade”: The Ethics of Epidemic Evolution in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio Lisa Lynch Three-quarters of the way into Greg Bear’s 1999 novel Darwin’s Radio, the novel’s protagonist, Kaye Lang, sees Dustin Hoffman on television as she flips channels in a motel room. The grim, exhausted Lang is momentarily transfixed by Hoffman, who reprises his role as an army researcher in the 1993 film Outbreak. Striding through an empty film studio (as if he were trying to return to the site of the film itself), the actor urges the public to remain calm in the face of a viral epidemic: You might remember I played a scientist fighting a deadly disease in a movie called Outbreak. I’ve been talking to the scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they’re working as hard as they can, every day, to fight SHEVA and stop our children from dying. 1 Hoffman’s television spot is a desperate measure, a public service announcement paid for by the U.S. government in an effort to combat mounting civil unrest. A newly emergent endogenous retrovirus called Scattered Human Endogenous Retro Virus Activation (SHEVA) is spread- ing unchecked around the country, causing miscarriages and odd facial deformities. Riots have broken out, infected pregnant women have been murdered, and scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Preven- tion (CDC) have failed utterly in their attempt to halt the epidemic. Self- exiled in her motel room, Lang reflects painfully on this failure; she herself has just quit the CDC’s SHEVA Taskforce after trying one last time to make them understand what SHEVA really is. She and a few other