Bookshelf: Richard Preston and Deadly Viruses
- October 1, 2012
- Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD
Story added by
Alice Truong
All the viral stuff that's best left unshared.
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In researching his 1994 non-fiction best-seller, The Hot Zone, author Richard Preston found himself in a precarious situation. He managed to convince an officer at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a government laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, to let him enter a hot zone containing the ebola virus.
"I wanted to try to conduct an interview with the silent protagonist of The Hot Zone, the ebola virus itself," he recalls.
While in the lab, Preston's biohazard suit burst open at the chest. In a room containing one of the deadliest contagions on the planet, he was exposed. Alarmed, one of the researchers who accompanied him patched and re-pressurized the suit. Since air only rushed out of the suit — not in — the virus wasn't able to get inside. It was a close call: had ebola entered Preston's blood stream, The Hot Zone would have had a very different ending.
In 2008, Preston penned Panic in Level 4, which recounts his ebola encounter and other harrowing experiences from writing his previous books. After his reporting, Preston says he's now “immune” to hypochondria. "If you live with the atomic bomb for so long, you get used to it," he says.
In his own words, here are five other picks from Preston to learn more about viruses:
Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer
Carl Zimmer is a brilliantly inquisitive mind with exquisite taste for weird stories in science. He really understands biology and knows a lot more than I do. Parasite Rex is about parasites — and all viruses are parasites, though some of Carl's parasites aren't viruses, such as worms in your brain. I also recommend Carl Zimmer's blog "The
Loom."
Spillover by David Quammen
Spillover is an encyclopedic look at viruses that are emerging from wild animals. He's travelled all over the world and gone into some really eerie places and come back with haunting news about the potential for a new outbreak that could affect the human species.
Life on a Young Planet by Andrew Knoll
Life on a Young Planet is about the appearance and evolution of early life forms on the planet, what we know about bacteria and, possibly, viruses three billion years ago. It's a fascinating look at how extremely adaptable life is and how life has a way of surviving in niches you couldn't believe. The book gives insights into these very primitive organisms that can attack our bodies and do terrible damage.
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
This is a work of fiction, a techno-thriller published in the 1960s. It's still a terrific read, just a page turner. It's a novel about a virus that appears from space and begins to sweep through a town and how scientists deal with it.
Smallpox and Its Eradication by Frank Fenner et. al.
This book weighs 25 pounds, and you can only find it in a library. It's a massive book about the eradication of smallpox, which was the worst infectious disease in human history. Small pox — talk about dangerous viruses — is believed to killed upwards of two billion humans in the past 200 years, almost all of them were children. This book was a principle source for my book, The Demon in the Freezer.
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