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6d6de67
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In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.
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nature
biology
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Richard Preston |
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d6b20aa
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To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
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Richard Preston |
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598a3a2
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When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.
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Richard Preston |
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65b506c
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The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
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medical
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Richard Preston |
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29f729f
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It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
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Richard Preston |
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6da3096
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Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12)
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Richard Preston |
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7b3dcec
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He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.
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solitude
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Richard Preston |
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ea2130d
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And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, "Chance favors the prepared mind."
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Richard Preston |
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3e17fde
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Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.
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humor
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Richard Preston |
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6612f94
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Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered." A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. "A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out," he said. A scream cut the air. It sounded nonhuman. He took his eyes off the water and looked around. "Hear that pheasant? That's what I like about the Bighorn River," he said. "Do you find viruses beautiful?" "Oh, yeah," he said softly. "Isn't it true that if you stare ..
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Richard Preston |
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ebb041e
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Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194)
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Richard Preston |
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ef1d357
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Chance favors the prepared mind.
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Richard Preston |
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673db29
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You can't fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.
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Richard Preston |
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ba6dbc3
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He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemo..
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genuinely-disgusted
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Richard Preston |
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aa2ebe8
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In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'lik..
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nature
science
the-hot-zone
virus
medicine
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Richard Preston |
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b8ab0f1
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Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.
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Richard Preston |
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ba0a823
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One room in the hospital had not been cleaned up. No one, not even the nuns, had had the courage to enter the obstetric ward. When Joel Breman and the team went in, they found basins of foul water standing among discarded, bloodstained syringes. The room had been abandoned in the middle of childbirths, where dying mothers had aborted fetuses infected with Ebola. The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus queen at the end of the ea..
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Richard Preston |
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5d5c216
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He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked. This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiratio..
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Richard Preston |
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fc60b21
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Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to..
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Richard Preston |
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41004cd
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He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit..
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Richard Preston |
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d442a70
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One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in medical research. Uganda was one of the biggest sources of these animals. As the monkey trade was established throughout central Africa, the native workers in the system, the monkey trappers and handlers, were exposed to large numbers of wild monk..
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Richard Preston |
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560908c
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The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the skull. He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the "vomito negro", or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two..
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Richard Preston |
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78a6992
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In 1986--the year before Peter Cardinal died--Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey. Therefore, Johnson wanted the members of the expedition to wear breathing apparatus in..
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Richard Preston |
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6b02910
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heart bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. Th..
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Richard Preston |
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30e0dcf
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Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty.
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fear
the-hot-zone
stare
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Richard Preston |
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43d1733
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Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a vil..
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Richard Preston |
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7228765
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We don't really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don't know what it might do in the future.
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Richard Preston |
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0a238cb
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Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.
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Richard Preston |
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61ba08b
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The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.
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Richard Preston |
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f195d57
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baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat up and turn black-and-blue, the semen goes hot with Ebola, and the nipples may bleed. In women, the labia turn blue, livid, and protrusive, and there may be massive vaginal bleeding. The virus is a catastrophe for a pregnant woman: the child is ..
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Richard Preston |
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67e7032
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they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin. The skin develops red spots, called petechiae, which are hemorrhages under the skin. Ebola attacks connective tissue with particular ferocity; it multiplies in collagen, the chief constituent protein of the tis..
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Richard Preston |
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fe11fc3
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The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth's immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.
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Richard Preston |
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f063627
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C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. (188)
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Richard Preston |
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a36c8fb
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In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions.
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Richard Preston |
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87b7958
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if people learned what this virus could do, there would be traffic jams heading out of Reston, with mothers screaming at television cameras, "Where are my children?"
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Richard Preston |
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8094ed4
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Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands--literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one's tongue.
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Richard Preston |
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62777ce
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A good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.
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Richard Preston |
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f49e7a4
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Suddenly he goes into the last phase--the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has "crashed and bled out." Or more politely they say that the victim has "gone down."
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Richard Preston |
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0d99324
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reaches a cell wall, it disintegrates into hundreds of individual virus particles, and the broodlings push through the cell wall like hair and float away in the bloodstream of the host. The hatched Ebola particles cling to cells everywhere in the body, and get inside them, and continue to multiply. It keeps on multiplying until areas of tissue all through the body are filled with crystalloids, which hatch, and more Ebola particles drift int..
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Richard Preston |
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72664f0
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Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guanarito. VEE. Monkeypox. Dengue. Chikungunya. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Junin. The rabieslike strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus.
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Richard Preston |
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281a190
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In 1986--the year before Peter Cardinal died--Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey.
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Richard Preston |
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12bc90c
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Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to..
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Richard Preston |
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7cbc052
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The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one's tongue.
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Richard Preston |
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82ecdb6
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but no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.
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Richard Preston |