Maraú Península: Richard Preston’s “Crisis in the Hot Zone”

From The New Yorker’s archive: the story of scientists’ formidable efforts to prevent the spread of Ebola into the human population.
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Richard Preston’s “Crisis in the Hot Zone”

The writer Richard Preston once remarked that viruses are “the nonhuman other that all human beings are contending with in many different ways.” Since 1986, Preston has contributed thirty pieces to The New Yorker, on a variety of subjects, including the behavioral implications of a rare disorder known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, the dangers of bioterrorism, and the mathematician brothers who built a supercomputer in their apartment in order to calculate pi. He has also published ten books, including “The Wild Trees” and “The Demon in the Freezer.” Preston is adept at uncoiling complex scientific concepts and transforming them into compelling narratives. In 1992, he published “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” a riveting piece about the aggressive ways that some viruses spread. (The piece was expanded into a best-selling book, “The Hot Zone,” published in 1994, which served as inspiration for the 1995 film “Outbreak,” and was also recently adapted into a National Geographic miniseries.) Preston traces the emergence of many new viruses to the degradation of various ecosystems, particularly tropical forests and savannas. Viruses in a damaged ecosystem tend to mutate and adapt quickly. “When a virus that lives in some nonhuman host is about to crash into the human species, the warning sign may be a spatter of breaks—disconnected emergences, at different times and places. I tend to think of rats leaving a ship,” Preston writes. “Crisis in the Hot Zone” focusses on the history and origins of the Ebola virus. Patients infected with Ebola endure horrifying symptoms; due to damage to the brain, their faces often take on a ghostlike expression. “They act as if they were already embalmed, even though they are not yet dead,” Preston writes. The heroes of Preston’s tale are the doctors on the front lines and the scientists at the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. The responsibility of U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D., Preston notes, is to identify “methods for stopping a monster virus before it ignites an explosive chain of lethal transmission in the human race.” Preston’s description of the extensive decontamination of one scientist, Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, after her glove was potentially breached during an examination of an Ebola-infected monkey, is one of the most spine-tingling passages I’ve ever read. In an arresting account, Preston chronicles the quick thinking of U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D. researchers as they raced to stop an outbreak of Ebola at a primate-quarantine unit in Reston, Virginia, in 1989. His story unfolds like a medical thriller as it follows the scientists’ formidable efforts to prevent a spread into the human population. As I write this to you in isolation, I remain haunted by Preston’s concluding words, written twenty-eight years ago, about the state of America’s public-health infrastructure: “We lack the forces to deal with a monster, at the very time when a monster could appear.” Preston’s work challenges us to ask what we’ll do and how we’ll react when the next “monster” virus appears at the door.

—Erin Overbey, archive editor