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The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.
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Richard Preston |
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farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from
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Richard Preston |
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A policy of moving out and doing it, and asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied.
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Richard Preston |
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On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus"--the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective p..
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Richard Preston |
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The boy swelled up, and his skin filled with pockets of blood. In some places, the skin almost separated from the underlying tissue. This happened during the last phase, while he was on the respirator. It is called third spacing. If you bleed into the first space, you bleed into your lungs. If you bleed into the second space, you bleed into your stomach and intestines. If you bleed into the third space, you bleed into the space between the ..
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Richard Preston |
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I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment," and he offered to pick up the sick man in an Army ambulance--put him in an Army biocontainment pod--and carry the pod to the Army's facilities at the Institute."
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Richard Preston |
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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. The bloo..
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Richard Preston |
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The emergence of Aids, Ebola and any number of other rain forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth, like Mount Elgon. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world's plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since a..
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Richard Preston |
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The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.
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Richard Preston |
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The Ebola war wasn't won with modern medicine. It was a medieval war, and it went down as a brutal engagement between ordinary people and a life form that was trying to use the human body as a means of survival through deep time. In order to win this war against an inhuman enemy, people had to make themselves inhuman. They had to suppress their deepest feelings and instincts, tear down the bonds of love and feeling, isolate themselves from ..
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humanity
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Richard Preston |
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Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.
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Richard Preston |
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The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children.
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Richard Preston |
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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 hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The
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Richard Preston |
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An amount of bot tox the size of the dot over this i would be enough to easily kill ten people. Bot tox is a nerve agent. It is one hundred thousand times more toxic than Sarin, the nerve gas that the Aum Shinrikyo sect released in the Tokyo subway.
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Richard Preston |
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Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects. Viruses are nature's crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crow..
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Richard Preston |
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we could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart
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Richard Preston |
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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,
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Richard Preston |
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Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver
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Richard Preston |
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Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants. Many of the giant trees I describe in this book, as well as the groves they inhabit, have only recently been discovered, and in some cases have been seen by fewer than a dozen people, including myself. To honor the tradition of botany, I won't reveal the exact locations of giant trees or..
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Richard Preston |
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virus. 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.
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Richard Preston |
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Frederick A. Murphy, a virologist who had helped to identify Marburg virus. He was and is one of the world's leading electron-microscope photographers of viruses. (His photographs of viruses have been exhibited in art museums.)
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Richard Preston |
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The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean-Congo. Sindbis. O'nyongnyong. Nameless Sao Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.
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Richard Preston |
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He calls it speleogenesis by elephants--the creation of a cave by elephants.
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Richard Preston |
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My virologist friends are always bioengineering viruses. I could see a bioengineered strain of smallpox getting into a terrorist's hands, and that's my fear. And then when we get a terrorist attack with smallpox, and the smallpox doesn't respond to the vaccine, we're in trouble.
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Richard Preston |
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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 admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.
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Richard Preston |
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The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior. Some of the dying stripped off their clothes and ran out of the hospital, naked and bleeding, and wandered through the streets of the town, seeking their homes, not seeming to know what had happened or how they had g..
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Richard Preston |
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A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth's cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day--Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly.
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Richard Preston |
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jump
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Richard Preston |
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to stand for "periphery." It is hard to ignore the ubiquity of pi in nature. Pi is obvious in the disks of the moon and the sun. The double helix of DNA revolves around pi. Pi hides in the rainbow and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water, pi emerges in the spreading rings. Pi can be found in waves and spectra of all kinds, and therefore pi occurs in colors and music, in earthquakes, in surf. Pi is everywhere in..
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Richard Preston |
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an expansion of pi to only forty-seven decimal places would be sufficiently precise to inscribe a circle around the visible universe that doesn't deviate from perfect circularity by more than the distance across a single proton. A billion decimals of pi go so far beyond that kind of precision, into such a lunacy of exactitude, that physicists will never need to use the quantity in any experiment--at least, not for any physics we know of tod..
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Richard Preston |
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It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment
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Richard Preston |
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When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the sho..
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Richard Preston |
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Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash.
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Richard Preston |
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In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species
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Richard Preston |
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Ebola is distantly related to measles, mumps, and rabies. It is also related to certain pneumonia viruses: to the parainfluenza virus, which causes colds in children, and to the respiratory syncytial virus, which can cause fatal pneumonia in a person who has AIDS.
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Richard Preston |
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A zoologist at Humboldt State, Michael A. Camann, climbed in the Atlas Grove and took samples of the fern mats and discovered that they are also sprinkled with tiny aquatic creatures, crustaceans of an unnamed species of copepod. Copepods are oval-shaped, shrimp-like creatures, barely visible to the naked eye, that are sometimes called the insects of the ocean.
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Richard Preston |
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As for the trees themselves, water that flows into a giant redwood through its roots takes two weeks or longer to reach the top of the tree, moving slowly upward through the tree's sapwood.
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Richard Preston |
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They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.
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Richard Preston |