Bioterror!

"Bioterror " is the fourteenth book in a series of near future SciFi/Thrillers. Their heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation that makes her a genius and provides her some astonishing athletic abilities. In "Bioterror," Ell's son Zage, a five-year-old prodigy, is continuing to follow his interests biology and genetics in keeping with his aim to eradicate what he perceives to be an obesity epidemic partially driven by communicable viral diseases. His mother gets him permission to skip ordinary primary and secondary schooling and enroll in university, studying molecular genetics. He'll be working in Dr. Reggie Barnes research lab where he hopes to learn how to take his ideas to the next level. Unfortunately, a talented virologist has joined a radical Islamic splinter group, promising to help them wipe nonbelievers from the face of the earth. He gets access to a forgotten smallpox culture and sets out to modify the already horrific disease into an even more lethal version, one which won't be prevented by standard vaccinations and is resistant to antiviral treatments. Zage has been working on a way to predict the proteins in viruses and recognize antigens in the viral shell that antibodies might be formed against. He's hoping to immunize people against obesity viruses, but there's no reason his new algorithm can't also be used to stop the modified smallpox virus... if he can work with the CDC to make his vaccination available.