By 1997, as well as generating publications in the medical sphere, the subject of bioterrorism was also beginning to produce its own popular literature. Preston had learned of the US military’s interest in a possible bioterrorist attack whilst writing The Hot Zone, and after its success, he turned his hand to fiction with The Cobra Event (Preston, 1997), a novel in which terrorists released advanced biological weapons to attack US civilians. Preston again used his contacts in the CDC, the FBI and elsewhere for his research for the novel. Lederberg is said to have advised Preston not only on technical detail – to revise his original story from anthrax weapons to a less plausible biologically engineered superbug (Miller et al., 2001) – but also on the story line – advising him to let the assassin die of his virus at the end of the book, in order to deter possible real-life imitators (Sarasin, 2006). Similarly, Tom Clancey in his 1996 novel Executive Orders (a sequel to his 1994 novel Debt of Honor, which presciently envisaged a highjacked 747 jet attacking the Capitol Building) , imagined the President declaring a national state of emergency in response to a terrorist attack using an airborne strain of Ebola virus (Annas, 2003).