William Birkin

First appearance: Resident Evil 2

Information

William was the discoverer of the G-Virus, and also the man ultimately responsible for the plan to develop it. Once the pride of Umbrella Corporation, he began to disagree with the company while he was working on the G-Virus, and he got into contact with the U.S. military. They jumped at the opportunity. They had intended to purchase B.O.W. from Umbrella, but they realized that if they could acquire a brilliant resource like William, that would be unnecessary.

However, although William planned to monopolize the plan by himself, he was put in a great predicament by an attack from Umbrella's Special Engineering Corps. Just before his death, he injected himself with the G-Virus. It turned him into an unknown life form G and sent him to his own destruction.

William began his journey to becoming a great scientist when he was still a teen. His scientific brilliance was recognized by Umbrella, and he was made an executive candidate and assigned to the executive training school. During that time, Albert Wesker was in the same year of training as him. In competition with each other, they worked toward the development of a progenitor virus and were eventually transferred to the Arklay Research Lab by the company president, Spencer. Promoted to senior scientist in charge of the T-Virus project at the young age of 16, William proceeded proudly with the project. However, three years after the project began, his peaceful life as a research scientist was thrown into chaos by the existence of one person.

That person was Alexia Ashford, inventor of Code: Veronica. She was made the head of the South Pole laboratory at just 10 years old. William became jealous of her. Burning with a competitive spirit and without proper planning, he continued with his research and experiments at a breakneck pace.

This continued until the announcement that Alexia had died in a contamination accident, but he experienced no advances with his research and merely wasted his time. However, eventually this research became the turning point in his T-Virus project. He succeeded in stabilizing his progenitor virus and created an incredible B.O.W. called Hunter. Then, after numerous experiments using the deathless human guinea pig, Lisa Trevor, he discovered an unknown virus, G, (prototype of the G-virus) in her body after injecting her with a parasitic organism (prototype developed during the Nemesis Project). He received permission from his company to proceed with his research to create a new type of virus. And so with his wife, Annette, he relocated to a brand new underground lab in Raccoon City and proceeded with his evil research into the G-Virus.

Death of William Birkin / birth of G

As the perceived end for Umbrella was unfolding in Raccoon City, William Birkin had been in constant contact with the United States Government. Just as William was packing samples of the G-Virus in order to turn them over to the US Government, Umbrella's Security Service confronted William. As William drew a weapon to defend himself, operative Martinez shot and killed William. After being scolded by HUNK, the USS squad reported the situation and were instructed to bring the samples back to Umbrella.

Having left William for dead, the USS squad was attacked by an unknown creature. As the creature quickly dispatched every member of the unit minus HUNK, this was William's initial transformation into G. Although William got his revenge on the Umbrella operatives that ended his life, that battle led to the spill of the G-Virus in the sewers of Raccoon City. As rats began to feed on the broken vials, the unsuspecting citizens of Raccoon City would soon be victims of the viral Outbreak and the devastation of the G-Virus.