The Origin of Evil

About the Book

The story begins with a group of well-meaning geneticists in charge of the designer baby project at a local fertility clinic in Southern California. Their hubris leads to a critical error in judgment. And the dire consequences of that needless blunder won’t be evident for years to come. Unfortunately, by then, it was be too late. Vatican City (Twenty Years Later) Pope Peter II, the first American pontiff, began having night frights so vivid and realistic that on the last day of each month he was afraid to fall sleep. The dreams were always the same. Pure evil was spreading through civilization like a terrible cancer. Worse yet, these nightmares would soon escape the boundaries of the Pope’s dreams and ultimately infest the civil workings of real world. On an urgent basis, Father Kevin McCarthy, a noted American geneticist, was summoned to Vatican City to investigate these strange happenings. What he and his colleague, Meighan Cole, found would join science and religion at the hip and then turn each discipline on its respective ear. They discovered that pure evil had its ancestral roots in human DNA and the names of those individuals missing this special gene were replete in the annals of history (Vlad the Impaler, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin, to name a few). But what Kevin found while digging even deeper into the matter was more staggering. This new generation of evil was not the product of classical evolution, but one created in a laboratory with the aid of a computer and a petri dish. This evil was destined to change the very nature of man and turn the entire human race into an advanced species without a genetic soul.

About the Author

Dr. Stephen Berberich is a retired interventional cardiologist with extensive training in the sciences. He is a graduate of Georgetown College and Georgetown Medical School. Dr. Berberich began an internship at the University of Pittsburgh and then moved on to a medical residency at Georgetown University Hospital. He finished his medical training with a cardiology fellowship at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Berberich is the lead author on the first published review of Post Exercise Echocardiography. This test subsequently became one of the gold standards for the early detection of coronary artery disease. In 1974, Dr. Berberich moved from the Boston area, where he was chief of cardiology at the Boston Naval Hospital, and came to southern California, where he continued in the private practice of cardiology until his retirement in 2004. Dr. Berberich is married and has three grown children. The Origin of Evil is one of four techno-thrillers he has written in the past six years. His first, No Known Species, was published in September of 2009, and The Gene Trap was published in September of 2011. His last novel, Shadows of Reality, was published in 2013. All three novels are currently available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Nook. After forty years in the fields of science and medicine, Dr. Berberich has acquired the background necessary to explore the mind-bending possibilities of DNA research. The novel comes as close to reality as Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Cook’s Coma.