“I sort of crept into fiction writing,” McSweegan said in a phone interview from his office at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. A short story won a competition atWriter’s Digest, but his first novel “sat in a drawer for a long, long time” because he couldn’t find an agent. Once again, a contest was the cure.

Deliberate Release, in which terrorists release an African virus in Washington, D.C., won an award from the Maryland Writers Association and was published by First Books. It’s available online through Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble, and Borders.

Trips to Egypt on an international health project helped McSweegan create realistic scenes in Cairo. His knowledge of the monkeypox virus fueled his thriller, but McSweegan could not believe it last summer when a real monkeypox virus hit the Midwest. The culprit was not a terrorist but a rodent imported from Africa that infected animals at a pet store. Even a novelist could not have predicted a tragedy like that. “I had no idea that anyone would be dumb enough to import rodents from West Africa,” he said.

McSweegan has devoted his career to preventing the nightmare scenarios he writes about. Last year he traveled to Siberia with a delegation that is trying to get former Soviet bio-weapons experts to collaborate on infectious disease research.

“We went to the vector facility in Siberia; it’s a very scary place. We’re trying to pull the scientists out of their Cold War shell and get them to collaborate on something productive, as opposed to something scary like ballistic missiles filled with smallpox.”

—David Gregorio ’80