Pristine water possessing natural healing powers is found miles under Antarctic ice by a group of scientists who stand to make billions from its sale. While people around the world line up to buy the therapeutic water, new cases of mad cow disease explode in rural France. Dr. Noah Haldane and his World Health Organization team are urgently summoned. Noah recognizes the deadliness of a prion, a microscopic protein that kills with the speed and ferocity of a virus, and Noah suspects that the prion's spread in France may not be a natural occurrence. Facing a spate of disappearances and unexplained deaths, Noah soon realizes that the scientific find of the century--a body of water the size of Lake Superior buried three miles under Antarctica--might hold the key to a microscopic Jurassic Park.