Dr. Norman Yang is one of only four or five people on the planet with sufficiently advanced training and skills that could even understand Elixr, let alone create the miracle drug that promises to change humanity forever. Trained at CalTech and obtaining his doctorate at MIT as a young man, Yang quickly rose in the ranks of the world's leading geneticsts and placed himself squarely on the bleeding edge of progress in the field of gene editing, using CRISPR delivery techniques.

When Desmond Martin approached him and floated the intial idea of Elixr, Yang was fascinated and leapt at the chance to provide the world with something so potentially game-changing. He threw everything into the effort, at the expense of his family, and ended up divorced and living alone as a result of his insatiable quest for perfection.

As his relationship grew ever more strained with his wife and came to the unavoidable conclusion of divorce, Norman Yang tried to devote himself to his teenage daughter before she moved even further away and attended college. When Kelly is kidnapped by terrorists as a way to force Yang to modify Elixr in the last few ctirical months before release--to suit their own twisted purposes--he tries to fight back with disastrous consequences for both himself and his daughter, who beocmes Patient Zero.

Norman Yang is the son of Chinese immigrants fleeing the totalitarian nightmare in Beijing in the mid-1900s. He is the part of the first generation of his family born in the United States and extremely proud of his heritage and his family's adopted nation. It is precisely the humanitarian crimes China has committed and continues to commit against its own people that drove Yang to join with Desmond Martin to create Elixr, a product with enormous potentional to help every human on the planet. Over the course of his decade in the employ of Martin Enterprises, he has become a personal friend of Martin and one of his most trusted confidants.

Dr. Yang was recently divorced from his wife, who has custody over their daughter, Kelly, and lives in Seattle, Washington. Yang's devotion to Desmond Martin and the Elixr Project took too much time from his family and he now lives alone as a result, often spending nights in the lab among his computers and testing equipment rather than returning to an empty rental house. His daughter, Kelly is a senior in high school in Seattle, and while she loves her doting, if often-absent father, is looking forward to the freedom that college affords, so she can escape the constant bickering and fighting of her parents.