The first major bioterror event in the United States-theanthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientistswho work with “hot” agents to find ways of protecting civilianpopulations against biological weapons. In The Demon in theFreezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 NewYork Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart ofUsamriid, the United States Army Medical Research Institute ofInfectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once theheadquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now theepicenter of national biodefense.
Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologistwho cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s most lethal emergingviruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to topsecret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is todevelop a drug that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated fromthe planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science,the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only twohigh-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease Control inAtlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute calledVector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It isalmost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostilestates, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by thethought that biologists in secret labs are using geneticengineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant toall vaccines.
Usamriid went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11 andactivated its emergency response teams when the first anthraxletters were opened in New York and Washington, D.C. Prestonreports, in unprecedented detail, on the government’s response tothe attacks and takes us into the ongoing FBI investigation. Hisstory is based on interviews with top-level FBI agents and with Dr.Steven Hatfill.
Jahrling is leading a team of scientists doing controversialexperiments with live smallpox virus at CDC. Preston takes us intothe lab where Jahrling is reawakening smallpox and explains, withcool and devastating precision, what may be at stake if his lastbold experiment fails.
【作者简介】
Richard Preston is the author of The Hot Zone, a #1 New YorkTimes bestseller, and of The Cobra Event, a bioterror thriller,also a New York Times bestseller. A writer for The New Yorker since1985, Preston won the American Institute of Physics award and isthe only nondoctor ever to have received the CDC’s Champion ofPrevention award. He has an asteroid named after him and livesoutside of New York City.
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