Biological warfare in popular culture

Biological warfare (BW) — or bacteriological, or germ, warfare — has had a presence in popular culture for over 100 years. Public interest in it became intense during the Cold War, especially the 1960s and ‘70s, and continues unabated. This article comprises a list of popular culture works referencing BW or bio-terrorism, but not those pertaining to natural, or unintentional, epidemics.

Literary

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• Jack London, in his 1909 short story '"Yah! Yah! Yah!"', described a fictional punitive European expedition to a South Pacific island deliberately exposing a Polynesian population to measles, causing many deaths. London wrote another science fiction tale the following year, "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910), in which the Western nations wipe out all of China with a biological attack.
• James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" (1969) is a short science fiction tale about a scientist traveling the world releasing a virus targeted to eliminate humanity before it can destroy all life on Earth via climate change. The same author also produced "The Screwfly Solution" (1977), a short horror science fiction story about a disease that turns the human sex drive into a drive to kill.
• The Stand (1978): in this Stephen King novel a weaponized strain of influenza (officially known as Project Blue and nicknamed "Captain Trips") is accidentally released from a remote U.S. Army base.
• The White Plague (1982): in this novel by science fiction writer Frank Herbert, a vengeful molecular biologist creates an artificial plague that kills only women, but for which men are the carriers. He releases it in Ireland (for supporting terrorists), England (for oppressing the Irish), and Libya (for training said terrorists); he then holds the governments of the world hostage to his demands or he will release more plagues.
• The Cobra Event (1998), a thriller by Richard Preston, describes an attempted bioterrorism attack on the US with a genetically engineered virus ("Cobra") that fuses the incurable and highly contagious common cold virus with smallpox. The resulting disease ("brain-pox") has symptoms mimicking Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, the common cold, and Nuclear Polyhedrosis Virus.
• The Quick and The Dead (2008), this thriller by Matthew John Lee describes the aftermath of an attack on the British Isles using an enhanced smallpox virus.
• The TimeRiders by Alex Scarrow features the use of a biological weapon. The weapon, code-named Kosong-ni Virus (named after the village that was Ground-Zero for the Virus) destroys approximately 99% of life on Earth within a few weeks.

Dramatic

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Movies

• The Satan Bug (1965), at "Station Three" — a top-secret US bioweapons lab in the Southern California desert — the protagonist investigates the murder of the security chief and disappearance of the director and head scientist; two lethal bioweapons — a strain of "botulinus" and a recently developed virus (the "Satan Bug") which could wipe out the earth's population in months — are missing.
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969): in this James Bond film, women are being brainwashed by the villain to disseminate bio-warfare agents throughout the world.
• The Omega Man (1971), a science fiction film starring Charlton Heston; in 1975, BW between China and Russia kills most of the world's population. The protagonist, a U.S. Army scientist/physician, renders himself immune with an experimental vaccine. (In the source novel, I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, the plague is coincident with a great war, but it is not clear that it originated with BW.)
• The Andromeda Strain (1971), although the microbial threat in this science fiction film is a natural one returning to earth with a satellite, the scientific response team comes across germ warfare simulations, strongly indicating that the responsible US government projects were designed to actively search for harmful bio-agents for use in BW.
• The Crazies (1973), a US Army plane carrying an untested bio-weapon (a virus code-named "Trixie") crashes near a small Pennsylvania town contaminating the water; infected victims either die or become violently homicidal; heavily armed U.S. troops in NBC suits and gas masks, soon arrive.
• Virus (1980) – in this Japanese movie, a deadly virus ("MM88") has been created accidentally by an American geneticist; it amplifies the potency of any other virus or bacterium it comes into contact with; in 1982, MM88 has been stolen from a lab in the US and a team of Americans vie with a shady East German scientist to recover it, but fail and a pandemic, initially known as the "Italian Flu", is the result.
• Men Behind the Sun (1988), a Hong Kong–Chinese historical war horror film graphically depicting war atrocities at Unit 731, a secret Japanese BW facility, during World War II; details the various cruel medical experiments inflicted upon Chinese and Soviet POWs.
• 12 Monkeys (1995)
• Philosophy of a Knife (2008), a Russian-American horror film covering the Japanese Army's Unit 731, mixing archival footage, interviews, and extremely graphic reenactments of the vile experiments performed there during WWII.
• Dasavatharam (2008), an Indian Tamil science fiction disaster film about a virus outbreak from a laboratory.
• In The Crazies (2010), the water in a small Iowa town becomes contaminated with "Trixie" — a "Rhabdoviridae prototype" bio-weapon — after a military cargo plane en route to an incinerator in Texas crashes; infected victims become cold, calculating, depraved, and bloodthirsty killers.
• 7aum Arivu (2011), an Indian science fiction martial arts film about the spreading of an ancient virus.

Television

• "Place of Angels" (1968), an episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (a British puppetry drama); at the "Bacteriological Research Centre" near Manchester, England, activation of a culture of "K14", a synthetic virus, threatens the lives of millions.
• In the series finale "The Seer" of Sliders (2000), the main characters land on a world where their enemy, the Kromaggs, were wiped out with a BW. One, Rembrandt Brown, injects himself with the virus (harmless to humans) and returns to Earth Prime in an unresolved cliffhanger in hopes of using it to free his homeworld.
• In "Reunion", the penultimate episode of the American TV series Falling Skies (2015), an alien known as the Dornia gives protagonist Tom Mason a BW to end an alien invasion of the Earth. After his wife Anne and friend Marty modify the virus to be harmless to humans, Tom sets out to deploy it in the series finale "Reborn". Tom infects himself as the alien queen is draining him of his blood. The virus passes through Tom's blood into her. As the queen is organically linked to her entire race, the BW destroys them, freeing the Earth from oppression.

Videogames

• Crysis 2 (2011), a large outbreak of "Manhattan virus", a gruesome disease causing complete cellular breakdown, causes civil unrest; people panic upon an alien invasion by the Ceph, the tentacled, squid-like alien race from the previous game, Crysis.
• Resident Evil (1996–present), Resident Evil originally was discovered through a plant that was taken by Umbrella Corporation which start the birth of biological weapon known as T-Virus. Later throughout the story, the final revelation of the Virus made by Umbrella Coroporation is an advanced C-Virus where Derek Simmons can be mutated into a dinosaur or a giant fly through virus mutation and in additional the C-Virus itself causes people to become a zombie and infest the other prey through biting or gas contact.

See also

• Weapons of mass destruction in popular culture
• List of fictional toxins § Fictional chemical/biological weapons