Ancestral Flower
Date: December 1966.
Along with Edward Ashford, James Marcus, and his student Brandon Bailey, he discovers an unknown virus from a flower that only grows in a place called the Garden of the Sun, deep in an ancient ruin in Africa.
This must be the flower that Henry Travis mentioned from Travis's "Natural Guide," a history of exploration on the African continent, and that eating it would give you tremendous powers.
If it can be researched and put into practical application, it will be a great achievement that will leave its mark on human history.
With this in mind, we named this flower the “Ancestral Flower.”
James and Brandon bring the founding flower back to America and begin growing it.
March of the following year.
James and Brandon fail to grow the original flower, and their research is halted.
To be precise, the cultivation itself was successful, but it turned out that the virus that was the target could only be produced locally, in other words, in the garden of the sun.
I tried to make the environment the same as a sun garden with all the elements like soil, water and sunlight hours, but the results remained the same.
Even tissue culture did not go as expected due to its ability to change genes.
In addition, this virus has been discovered to be highly toxic and can cause death to those ingesting it if it is not compatible.
Then in August of the following year.
Having given up on growing the ancestral flower in America, we planned to capture some of the African relics where it grows from the indigenous Ndebaya people.
Of course there was resistance, but the situation was as simple as a primitive man with hair.
The capture was successful due to the employment of military personnel.
He built a research facility at that location and appointed Brandon as its director.
In the United States, James receives the original field-transmitted virus and begins searching for it.
This led to the announcement of the formation of a company called Umbrella Pharmaceuticals to cover research on the original virus that had been previously proposed.
The above is the founding history of Umbrella Corporation, which later became a global pharmaceutical company.
With Progenitor, it is the first major virus.
It is found inside the 'Stairway to the Sun' flower found in Africa.
Because of the extremely volatile requirements, the virus can only be grown from the said flower in its native Africa. (An attempt to re-sample resulted in failure to produce the predecessor.)
As such, the virus is known to be deadly, but if consumed by someone with compatible genes, it would grant them great power.
For this reason it was used as a rite of passage for early Ndebaya chieftains. (before update)
The Umbrella Corporation set up a facility in the area to grow the virus and then sent it to other branches for experimentation, one of the products being the Tyrant Virus (which I believe was created by Marcus by bonding leech DNA with the Progenitor).