BIOHAZARD 2: THE MICROBIAL CLOCK OF HUMANS

How Infections Shape Our Brains, Bodies, Lives, and Future

Instead of a Preface

A human life rarely unfolds as a single, continuous story.

More often, it resembles several lives lived within one lifetime. Interests change. Ideas emerge and disappear. Convictions evolve. External events—political, scientific, or deeply personal—can redirect a life in ways that no one could predict.

Only in retrospect do we begin to understand how these different lives are connected. This book is not a memoir.

Dear Reader,

Many years ago, I wrote a book called Biohazard. In many ways, it was a memoir. It described events that belonged to a particular time and a particular system. It told the story of a world that few people had seen from the inside.

More than twenty-five years have passed since that book was published.

During those years, the world, science, and medicine changed, and my own life changed as well. But perhaps the most important realization that came with time was something very simple: a human life rarely follows a single path.

We often imagine life as a continuous line moving steadily from beginning to end. In reality, most people live several lives within one lifetime. Our interests change. Our convictions evolve. Ideas appear, disappear, and sometimes return in completely new forms. External forces—history, politics, discoveries, unexpected encounters—can redirect a life in ways that no plan could anticipate.

This book is not a memoir.

Instead, it is an attempt to show—through the example of one ordinary life, my own—how a person moves through different intellectual worlds, different professions, and different ways of understanding reality. I am not presenting my story because it is exceptional. On the contrary, I believe it demonstrates something universal: any person with curiosity, persistence, and motivation can contribute to ideas larger than themselves.

Each of us, in a sense, becomes the author of several lives.

Sometimes those lives are shaped by deliberate choices. Sometimes they are shaped by events beyond our control. But in every case, they are influenced by the ideas we choose to follow—and by the questions we refuse to ignore.

One moment that profoundly shaped my own thinking occurred during my medical education.

I witnessed a death that never left me.

She was fifteen years old. By the time she was admitted to the hospital, the diagnosis was already precise—infective endocarditis. The causative agent had been identified, the antibiotics selected correctly, and the treatment had been formally administered in accordance with accepted standards. From the standpoint of medical protocol, everything was done “by the book.”

She still died.

Not suddenly, not dramatically, but predictably—of complications that unfolded step by step, as if following a script written long before she entered the hospital. Emboli. Progressive organ failure. A heart that could no longer compensate for the damage that had been accumulating quietly.

When it was over, the case was discussed, documented, and closed. There was no scandal. No mistakes to correct. No one questioned the system.

What troubled me was not that she died, medicine is not omnipotent, but that her death was treated as an isolated event, disconnected from everything that had preceded it.

No one asked how long the infection had been present.

Why had it gone unnoticed?

What signals had been ignored?

Or why the body had been fighting a losing battle long before the final diagnosis was made.

That was the moment I first understood that medicine often recognizes disease only when it becomes irreversible.

At the time, I could not fully articulate why this realization disturbed me so deeply. Years later, I would understand it as the beginning of a conflict—between biological reality and the simplified frameworks that medicine often uses to manage complexity.

I did not plan to write this book.

For many years, I believed that I had already said what needed to be said. Biohazard was meant to close a chapter of my life—to describe a system, a mindset, and a dangerous illusion that science could exist independently of moral responsibility.

I assumed that once the truth was written down, it would stand on its own.

I was wrong.

What followed were not answers, but an accumulation. Accumulation of questions. Of clinical observations that did not fit official explanations. Of patterns repeating themselves across countries, cultures, and generations.

And perhaps most importantly, an accumulation of responsibility.

This book was not written out of ambition.

It was written out of discomfort.

We live in a time when the word war has returned to everyday language. Some wars are visible—tanks, missiles, destroyed cities. Others are quieter and far more insidious. They unfold inside the human body: within the immune system, within the brain, within the invisible conflicts between microorganisms and their hosts.

These wars do not end with ceasefires.

They persist.

They adapt.

And they wait.

My own life has moved through very different scientific landscapes. I began my medical education in Kazakhstan and Russia, where I first encountered the complexity of infectious diseases. Later, working with some of the most dangerous pathogens known to humanity, I learned that microorganisms do not recognize moral categories. They simply exploit weakness, delay, denial, and complacency.

Over time, my attention shifted—from spectacular, acute infections to the slower and more complex processes that unfold silently over years. From outbreaks that attract global attention to biological conflicts that remain largely invisible.

I began to see how many modern diseases are not sudden events, but consequences.

Consequences of infections that were never fully resolved.

Immune responses that never returned to balance.

Biological systems that learned to survive in a damaged state.

Parents taught me things that textbooks never mentioned. Patients revealed connections that scientific literature discussed only in fragments.

Across thousands of consultations, one realization became impossible to ignore: many of the diseases we call “modern” are not mysteries at all. They are processes unfolding over time—often beginning long before medicine notices them.

This is where the idea of the microbial clock emerges.

Just as every organism lives within biological time, microorganisms follow their own timelines. They evolve, persist, adapt, and interact with the human body in ways that can shape health over years, decades, and sometimes generations.

Many of the chronic conditions that define modern medicine may be the long-term echoes of biological processes that began quietly and went unrecognized.

The microbial clock does not align with our medical classifications.

It continues whether we measure it or not.

This book is an attempt to speak openly about those processes.

It is not a manifesto.

It is not an accusation.

And it is not a memoir.

It is a reflection on how ideas evolve, how scientific paradigms change, and how a single human life—any human life—can intersect with those changes.

If there is one reason this book exists, it is this:

Silence has become more dangerous than controversy.

The microbial clock continues to move.

And pretending not to hear it does not stop time.