Viral portraiture

Of all things—a scene that has stayed with me, from the late ’70s TV series The Incredible Hulk, since I saw it as a ten-year-old: Bill Bixby’s David Banner, the scientist who is Hulk’s mild-mannered embodiment, has fallen in love with a terminally-ill psychiatrist, played by Mariette Hartley. Banner has identified the disease attacking her cells’ mitochondria; using her pioneering hypnosis technique, they now visualize her cells rebuffing the pathogen’s…