A journalist accompanies an international team of biologists to explore the permafrost for genetic remnants of a deadly disease of the Middle Ages.
In a quest for Nobel prizes, publishing rights, and bio-patent riches, virus hunters the world over search for antiquity's deadly pathogens that may lie dormant in the frozen tundra.
In this story, microbe-obsessed detectives push the envelope of risk as they pursue the source of one of the most lethal and mysterious outbreaks in human history - something the inhabitants of the day feared even more than the Black Death. Is 21st Century Man, let alone his immune system, prepared to face the consequences of this reckless archaeology?