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Chapter 1

MY STUDIO space felt like a favorite pair of jeans, worn and co them I was sure I could conquer the world Here behind , I was invincible

“Welcoht Hour, the show that isn’t afraid of the dark or the creatures who live there Thanks for joining ood ti”

Over the years since I’d started working at KNOB after college, and since I’d launched raded equip procedures, and syndicated to aled, but this still felt like home It would always feel like ho” as the intro My sound guy, Matt, still engineered the whole show froh the booth , head bent over the board A big guy with short black hair and a laid-back attitude, he’d been with ot to be too much for me to handle and we syndicated and suddenly had a mountain of technical issues The show and I wouldn’t have made it this far without him I should probably tell him that

“My guest this evening is a regular on the show, ood friend Dr Elizabeth Shumacher, who heads up the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology at the NIH, and e science and research on the conditions we know as vampirism and lycanthropy Welcome back to the show, Dr Shumacher”

“Thanks, Kitty, I’hthe interview froton, DC—very late at her time, which meant I owed her one On the plus side, I could interview her while in my jeans and T-shirt, sans makeup, hair tied up in a scrunchy One of the many reasons I loved radio—I didn’t have to dress up

In my chipper radio-host voice I said, “I understand there’s so that scientists in of va the source of lycanthropy What can you tell me?”

Shu evenly and articulately about everything I’d ed woman who embodied calher onto the show We needed people like her to cut through the legends and fear and get to the truth

“It’s far too early to beBut we have soht to point us to some fruitful new lines of inquiry”

“Which is scientist speak for, you’re not going to stick your neck out, which is fine, but I’ to let you off the hook that easily,” I said “What exactly is this research about?”

“For so hypothesis that vampirish a variation of retroviral infection Think of it as a kind of nefarious gene therapy Gene therapy can be used to replace a portion of a patient’s faulty, mutated DNA with healthy DNA Viruses are often used to deliver healthy DNA, since they’re naturally designed to attach to human cells, inject their own DNA, and reproduce quickly Only in the case of vampirism, healthy human DNA is replaced by the DNA markers indicative of vampirism”

I got just enough of what she was talking about to knoas dangerous But I wanted to understand It was half the reason I did the show in the first place The other half caht actually be able to help people Just a few people I wasn’t trying to change the world

“So va a cold, except instead of just a runny nose, it transfor entirely?”

“It’s a bitamused She understood the need to paraphrase for the lowest common denominator audience I’d read the papers she’d sent et there “Most people have antibodies that repel cold viruses—the symptohting off the infection It’s h for huainst, and so it’s able to transform the host DNA without resistance The next step is to confir the trans virus”

“How close are you and your colleagues to doing that?”

“Well…”—and this here I could tell she was self-editing—“not as close as we’d like Samples are not all that easy to come by”