Lawrence Nichols

"We live in a time of war and WMD proliferation. If you continue to be blind to our lack of preparedness, then Americans will die, and I will have no problem in pointing the blame at you!"

Doctor Lawrence Nichols was a minor character who appeared in Amplification in video footage.

History
Dr. Lawrence Nichols studied anthrax at Fort Detrick and was highly respected in the defense community. After the 2001 Amerithrax attacks, he became a fanatic and proposed a large $50 billion project to defend against further attacks. The plan included supplying every home with gas masks and a two months supply of ciprofloxacin for each resident and giving all hospitals in major cities biosafety decontamination capabilities. During a classified meeting on January 31 in 2002 with the National Defense Committee, they declared that spending that much money and effort at preparing for an attack that may or may not happen was completely unrealistic. Nichols had an outburst and was later demoted to working with the influenza for Bio-Design Technology, one of Fort Detrick's subcontractors. He later divorced his wife. At one point, presumably before his demotion, Nichols wrote a classified study about anthrax terrorism which included a mock anthrax attack on the D.C. train systems.

Before Amplification, a University of Maryland public policy student named Chad Brown requested Nichols' help with a thesis paper. Nichols became his mentor and even produced a new, more hazardous strain of anthrax together with him. Some of Nichols' opinions, including parts of his 2002 proposition, were included in the thesis. When Brown took Nichols' beliefs to the extreme, attacking a book store he once worked at using the anthrax in an attempt to prove a point, the two had an argument which resulted in Brown killing Nichols. Brown then went on to perform a larger anthrax attack on the local park.

Appearance

 * Season Four
 * Amplification