In a small desert town, dozens of unsuspecting people suddenly drop dead from a mysterious plague. The infectious agent has come from outer space; it has no known cure, and the U.S. government must scramble to contain it before it destroys the world.
This is the plot of "The Andromeda Strain," a 1969 novel by author Michael Crichton. The book was published just two months before humans first set foot on the moon, and it sparked widespread panic about what the Apollo 11 astronauts might bring back. Luckily, NASA had a quarantine protocol in place for the mission. But those measures might have been largely for show, according to new research published in the science history journal Isis.
