A Code For Carolyn - A Genomic Thriller

Respected Molecular Biologist and University Lecturer Carolyn Grey has a secret.

Someone has found out that secret and is now threatening to expose her over it.

Someone who is very dangerous and single-minded about their ultimate goal.

Someone with powerful backers who are equally just as determined to bend Carolyn to their combined will, in order to ensure that she does their bidding without question or hesitation.

For Carolyn's secret is only the precursor to something infinitely more dangerous, something from Carolyn's past she is unable to recall, something to do with her now disgraced parents, and something her unknown tormentor will do anything to obtain - even murder.

In a not-so-distant society, where corporations wield as much power as nations and the line between corporate employee and state run authority is blurred to non existence, Carolyn soon finds herself fighting for both her very survival and sanity. 

Now isolated and alone, with no one she can trust - not even law enforcement - Carolyn needs to unravel both her own and her parents past activities as she comes to realise just how dire the consequences will be for her and for humanity if she fails. 

And if she fails, her tormentor has already made clear what her fate will be....

This fast-paced novel is followed by an extensive science chapter where the Author provides a non-technical primer on modern genetics and on the speculative biology behind this adventurous mystery.

This book is Volume XXXII of the ongoing 'Science And Fiction' Book Series created and produced by the publisher of this book as a way to encourage people to become involved in all fields of Scientific endeavour through the use of Fiction and to encourage people to research topics that they may find intriguing when reading Science Fiction Authors. The series was initially designed for high school and university students as a teaching resource but due to their popularity are now being read by people of all ages all across the world.

This book includes 6 Photographic illustrations.

The American/Scottish Author Doctor Victoria Anne Smith is part of Scotland's St Andrews College Biology Department, where she runs an laboratory based integrative research programme combining computational sciences with experimental microbiology. She can trace her dual interest in biology and computation back to her undergraduate days, where she received a degree in Biology with a Mathematics minor from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, America. Her PhD work at Indiana University (USA) examined animal behaviour from a complex systems perspective. Since that time the Author has done research in areas as diverse as neuroscience, genetics, cancer and ecology. 

Much of her current work concentrates on the problem of ‘network inference’ - the discovery of network structure from observational data. She was on the forefront of application of Bayesian networks for inferring gene regulatory networks and pioneered the use of Bayesian networks to infer neural information flow networks and ecological interaction networks. She continues to develop improvements for Bayesian network inference algorithms in genetics, neuroscience, and ecology and is heavily involved in undergraduate teaching across all years, and in curriculum development.

She now resides fulltime in Scotland and is a citizen of that country, with no intention of returning to the USA, her main hobbies are reading and writing Science Fiction, Bird Watching and Cold Water Diving. This is her first ever published fiction work, but she has published numerous scientific research papers in the past.