I was thinking more along the lines of Michael Chrichton’s “Andromeda Strain”.
In that story, the virus with impossible properties was alien. The human error was to inadvertently introduce it into the earth’s atmosphere, while its nature remained unknown. In this case we are contemplating a production of the human intellect, which seems to follow the moral pattern of Cat’s Cradle, even if the novel’s premise was based on simple physics instead of biology.