Back to the roots of the bioterror novel. The earliest one I or anyone else has been able to dig up, to my knowledge, was written in 1936:The Motives of Nicolas Holtz: Being The Wierd Tale of the Ironville Virus.
Like its modern-day equivalents, its a hybrid of detective story, social issues novel, and cutting-edge science (and full of sentences like "her dress refused to hide the indolent curves of her body). The novel proper is framed by an "explanation" which claims it is based on a series of reporter's notebooks. The action takes place in an industrial town (Ironville) amidst a series of miner's strikes and skirmishes between well-meaning miners, evil union-busters, and sinister Bolshevik organizers. The germ itself is invented by -- you guessed it -- a Red named Tom Howerth, though his intention is not to create a supervirus, but rather to generate life in a test tube. He's criticized for this by his friends, who insist that he should "help us to Sovietize this lousy country" rather than trying to "bring new life into this lousy world." The life he creates, turns out to be the Ironville Virus, an entirely novel microorganism that solidifies the blood in the veins of its victims. It's appropriated by a fairly fascist millionaire named Nichola Holz, who declares in one part of the book that an ideal society would gas its "unemployables" -- or use germs on them.
As intermittent outbreaks begin to alarm police and governmental officials, Communists and capitalists struggle to control the biological agent and the antivirus which is developed to arrest its effects. At one point, one of the Communists speculates how the virus might be used to effect a plan of world domination, figuting the germs are "worth as many millions as you can scare one of the major nations into thinking they're worth." By the end of the novel, the virus is contained, just after the most malevolent Communists and capitalists fall prey to fatal infection. But while the narrator's attitude towards Holz softens when the millionare expresses deathbed remorse (rejecting the beliefs of Nietzsche), his disgust with the Communists intensifies in the final pages of the book. One Red female, "Bisky" -- comes to stand for the dangers of polemical amorality: "expediency and the cause of the proletariat were her only philisophical tests for the merit of any action."
Prefiguring the "how-to" sections of current bioterror novels (in a future installment, Preston vs. Cook on the ethics of the how-to section in the bioterror thriller) "The Motives" iends with an appendix titled "A Brief Digest of Howerth's Method for Vivifying Inert Matter. The authors detail the science behind Howerth's attempts to create life, comparing the development of Howerth's equipment to the development of the automobile. An excerpt:
"He worked on the principle that life is a process of slow explosion, a molecular action in essence very similar to that which demolishes a stick of dynamite, but occuring in compounds of such intricate and subtle substance that the reaction could spread only gradually from molecule to molecules...it was the spark of life which he sought, and it was his hypothesis that life must have been generated originally, as Earth cooled, by the disorganizing effects of a bolt of lightning upon a pool where the proper balance of chemicals happened to be existing in solution,"
9:28:46 AM 
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