"Blood Music" directly involves experimentation with dangerous microbes and indirectly involves the manipulating of genes, two aspects of advanced science that are very worrying to many people. These fears, though often dismissed as irrational, are in fact reasonable ones shared by some scientists. Certainly, people have good cause to be worried about microbes such as the smallpox virus escaping into the human population; some microbes have the potential to kill people by the millions. Proper security is important when people experiment with dangerous germs, and even very exacting standards of handling them may not be enough, given the error-fraught and mistakeprone nature of human beings.

A real-life example of this occurred at the English laboratory that houses a sample of the smallpox virus for possible study in the event that a similar virus someday attacks people. A lapse in security procedures resulted in the death of...