In The Andromeda Strain, what is one experiment set up at Wildfire?
There are several experiments run by the scientists of The Andromeda Strain, as the novel is hard science fiction with a very realistic depiction of medical investigation. One experiment in chapter 15 details their use of a supercomputer to locate the organism itself that caused the outbreak in the story. The computer magnifies the specimen, first by five-fold and then by twenty-fold, but does not reveal anything.
Finally they find a black speck: the story has both characters excited at the possibility of discovering a totally new type of life. However, they notice that the organism, upon inspection, begins to change color. The scientists determine that it is growing: although they do not know it at the time, it is eventually revealed that this is because the organism feeds on energy.
The scientists then use a variety of organic mediums for growing the organism in hundreds of petri dishes...
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so they can expose it to different levels of heat, light, pressure, oxygen, and vacuum. The results that they receive in chapter 17 detail how the organism was capable of spreading but not killing the two survivors, the old man and the infant.
The scientists at Wildfire conduct many experiments to try to find out what the deadly organism is and how it works. Their goal is to devise a way to counteract and destroy it. In chapter 16, when they discover that the organism causes blood to clot and solidify, which results in death, Burton decides to run a test to determine whether preventing the blood from clotting would prevent death. So he injects some laboratory rats with Heparin, an anticoagulant drug, and exposes them to the organism. The rat that receives a small dose of Heparin dies almost immediately, and one injected with a large amount dies shortly afterward. The experiment fails, but the scientists have gathered the information that the anticoagulants have no effect on the organism.
Can you describe one experiment, possibly the rat experiment, conducted at Wildfire in "The Andromeda Strain"?
Though the researchers at Wildfire aren't sure what organism is causing the deaths, they use their limited knowledge of the microbe's behavior and symptomatology to test possible cures on samples in controlled environments.
One experiment they design comes after they notice that the microbe causes blood clots. Hypothesizing that these blood clots are causing the deaths, they expose the rats to the organism after trying to inoculate them against the clotting with varying amounts of an anticoagulant called Heparin. They keep all of the rats' other environmental factors constant to minimize the amount of statistical noise from other random variables in their findings.
The rats which receive a small dose of Heparin die instantly, and the rats which receive a large dose die after a slightly longer interval. This allows the scientists to conclude that though blood clotting is a slight contributing factor to the infection's fatality, it is not the primary cause of death.