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A Fate Worse Than Anthrax
Richard Preston, the Cassandra of contagion, gave us the willies with The Hot Zone, and kept President Clinton up into the wee hours with The Cobra Event. The best-selling author's latest petri dish of horrors is The Demon in the Freezer, a nonfiction look at the prospect of the smallpox virus being used as a bioweapon. We phoned Preston at home. He took the call from his yard, just as it had begun to rain. We told him to get inside before he caught a cold, then asked him about microbes and men.
WIRED: Does thinking about bioterrorism keep you awake at night?
PRESTON: Last fall, I started thinking that the anthrax terror attack might be a prelude to a smallpox attack, and that kept me awake at night. Smallpox is the one organism that makes me worry for my family.
What makes it so much worse than anthrax?
Smallpox knows how to make copies of itself. Unchecked, an outbreak of smallpox will amplify globally in 20 weeks. The death rate for people infected by natural, unmodified smallpox is one in three.
Using it as a bioweapon is hardly as easy as dropping a sample in the mail.
No, instead it'll be human virus missiles - people in the early stages of infection, taking airplanes around the country.
Should we have destroyed smallpox completely after its "elimination" in the 1970s?
That's the central tension of The Demon in the Freezer. Some people feel it needs to be made totally extinct. Some people feel that, since it's in the hands of people who want to use it as a weapon, the way to deal with it is to keep it and do experiments with it in a CDC lab.
What do you think?
The smallpox virus is the worst enemy facing the human species. We have every reason to eradicate it - we should have done it.
Isn't your book a how-to for wannabe bioterrorists?
I'm not giving terrorists any ideas they didn't already have. The world of viral biology today looks like nuclear physics in the late 1930s. Some really scary bioweapons are going to be made. The international community of biologists doesn't want to hear about it, but the scientific community needs to think about how to defend against weaponized smallpox - and the biologists need to have this shoved in their faces.
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