The Division Wiki
Advertisement
The Division Wiki

Gordon Amherst is the individual behind the Green Poison, or Dollar Flu as some NPCs refer to it. His whereabouts were unknown until the end of the game when he is found dead in an empty laboratory. Given that Amherst's biological crimes were the cause of the events of Tom Clancy's The Division, he's construed to be the main antagonist of the first game.

Biography[]

Gordon Amherst is the virologist and adjunct at the Cooper Union who is responsible for having designed the Green Poison virus. He digitized the Variola major genetic code for various recombination experiments, and exploited 3D-printing technology to fabricate the strain.

Dr. Amherst fervently believed that human-caused climate change had sent the ecosystem barreling past a point of no return, with extreme weather events, species loss, and environmental contamination all combining to doom the planet. He posited that the human race itself had become a menace to biological life, a kind of "mass contagion" that needed to be thwarted on a global scale. In the years leading up to his death, his controversial viewpoints made Amherst something of a pariah on the college campuses where he worked or delivered guest lectures on "Human Obsolescence in the Biosphere." Several of his talks nearly even triggered riots.

Inspired by this deadly notion, Dr. Amherst chose to become a covert combatant in what he perceived to be a war for survival between mankind and nature. He employed his expertise in virology as a weapon. Recent breakthroughs in digitizing DNA made the process of breeding new generations of lab-grade pathogens a thousand times faster. Taking his credo to its logical conclusion, Amherst decided it was acceptable for billions to die if the trade-off was Earth's survival.

His next step was to obtain a bootlegged smallpox strain from an as-yet-unidentified source. Once he identified the Variola chimera genetic variation as an efficient bio-terror agent, Amherst used a 3D biological printer to manufacture samples. The last step was to find a stealthy, foolproof method of proliferation, preferably one with symbolic significance. Hence, the tainted money: in Amherst's eyes, a perfect symbol of human greed.

Amherst was discovered dead by Division agents in his laboratory several weeks after the outbreak began, ironically removed from the human gene pool by his own disease.

Tom Clancy's The Division 2[]

  • While deceased through all the events of Tom Clancy's The Division 2, it's heard in a comm during the classified assignment NSA Site B13, that they had proof of Gordon Amherst's potential crimes.
  • In an alternate timeline Gordon Amherst is referenced in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Dragonfire, to which Gordon was stopped before he could carry out his bioterrorism act.
    • It is still not confirm by Ubisoft if the Strategic Homeland Division is within the Splinter Cell universe.
  • When Division agents infiltrated the Descent facility beneath Washington D.C and recovered intel from the NSA databases, a number of comms were discovered revealing that an NSA analyst tried to warn Calvin McManus about Gordon Amherst, though the Secretary of Homeland Security continuously brushed him off as not a threat. It is not known why McManus dismissed Amherst as a threat, though there's a possibility he and other elements in the US government saw the virologist's plans as a means to power.


Gallery[]


Appearances[]

Advertisement