Science Fiction: Turning a Natural Immunity into a Pill or Something

PiratePhillips

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Hi guys!

Somehow my book wandered into science fiction, and I'm not so great at the 'science' part of it. It's futuristic, so nothing needs to be possible NOW, but I would like something that's plausible.

Here's where I'm stuck. My MC has a natural immunity to the Big Bad's means of control, which he distributes through the air-filtration system of his city. She wants to somehow make her immunity available to the others. Um, how? Plus, they hate her, so they wouldn't take anything willingly because they don't trust her.

Ideas?

Please and thank you.
 

Jason

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Makes me think of The 100 - futuristic TV show where 100 juvenile delinquents are sent down from a space station to a post apocalyptic earth to "test" if the radiation levels are livable. Another surface subset of people are trying to steal their blood to build up their own immunity.

That said, I can't wait until Netflix makes season 3 available! :)
 

waylander

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If the natural immunity is antibody based then those could be isolated, cloned and manufactured but this is a complex and time-cònsuming process
 

PiratePhillips

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Waylander, what would the effect be on the subject? Would my MC be harmed in the process of cloning her antibodies, or is this up to me?

- - - Updated - - -

CBJason, That sounds like a great story! I'll check it out, now that I've officially caught up on Gilmore Girls.
 
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King Neptune

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I agree with Waylander, but it's also a matter of the bad one's "means of control"? If he is attacking through some physical facet of the brain that some people lack, then it could be difficult.
 

PiratePhillips

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Right? I can't seem to get my idea into plausibility.

I want the bad guy to be medicinally getting his subjects to have irrational fear, maybe through something he designed through a concoction of animal pheromones or something. Maybe through stimulating the amygdala. SOMEHOW. I want the MC to be immune to this, possibly through genetic manipulation, possibly just because she was born that way. But that does seem to be something that would just be a physical aspect of her brain and not something that is mutable into an antidote.

I keep thinking my only recourse is to add magic, and then I get a World Building headache.
 

waylander

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Raising antibodies would require the MC to do no more than donate blood. If the big bad has genetically engineered a virus infects the brain and stimulates fear and is distributing in in aerosolysed form, then an antibody to that virus is going to be effective as a defence. .
 

King Neptune

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I agree with Waylander, but I also like the concept of the MC being immune by nature, and there being some inborn thing. There are quite a few chemicals, odors, foods, or whatever that have a good flavor to some people and a bad flavor to others, and bitterness isn't the only key. I was thinking of the tolerance for beets, some people can't tolerate them. If the baddie is using a chemical that affects 99% in a certain way, and the MC is in the 1%, then you have it. One such chemical is nicotine, but about 50% are affected by it and are potential addicts, while the other 50% are not affected by it, so they don't understand how people smoke tobacco.
 

neandermagnon

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Raising antibodies would require the MC to do no more than donate blood. If the big bad has genetically engineered a virus infects the brain and stimulates fear and is distributing in in aerosolysed form, then an antibody to that virus is going to be effective as a defence. .

A vaccine would be much better though as that would give acquired immunity which is much more robust and longer lasting than passive immunity, which only lasts as long as the antibodies themselves. (In active immunity your body learns how to make its own antibodies against something.)

Is this set in the future? It may be possible to give vaccines that can be breathed in, although none that I know of are in existence currently. The live polio vaccine used to be given orally (still is in some parts of the world, though it's being replaced by a non-live injected vaccine). You'd distribute an attenuated form of the virus the same way the original virus was being distributed. People would breathe in the attenuated one and start forming their own antibodies against it.

That would beg the question as to whether people wouldn't just form their own antibodies against the original virus, if it's not actually killing them. Maybe the virus has some feature that stops the body from creating antibodies to it (which is the case with HIV because it attacks the very immune cells that create active immunity) but the attenuated version is modified so it doesn't have that feature, so it enables people to make their own antibodies, which then destroy both the attenuated and original version of the virus (because both viruses have the same antigens, one being an attenuated form of the other).
 
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RX-79G

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If it is a pheromone thing, how about temporarily killing everyone's ability to 'smell' pheromones with some sort of chemical or histamine?