Wild Type

This action-filled suspense novel, a fiction debut, pits two young scientists against a U.S. Defense Department and scientific establishment gone berserk. Doctors Jason McCane and Jennifer Darien come to Washington as fellows of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. They are soon involved in projects engineered by Dr. Paul Kalia, a charismatic scientist who seeks to change social behavior by manipulating brain activity and through gene transfers. The fledgling researchers discover, however, that Dr. Kalia is more than charismatiche's power-mad, and so is his patron, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Smoothly paced as it builds to an exciting conclusion, the book nonetheless suffers from a basic lack of credibility. Its theme of science and bureaucracy gone haywire, which presumes two madmen at top levels of power, is fictional overkill. And the denouement occurs in a setting that's particularly hard to believe: a secret three-mile-long, 600-foot-high underground laboratory near Washington. (Feb.)