Quotes from Richard Preston

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 crowd in a hurry.

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

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

Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.

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.

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.

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.)

Lake of the Woods is asleep for the winter, but it is dreaming. Marie feels that she can hear the dreams of the lake running through the ice, like thoughts in a language we don't know.

The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean-Congo. Sindbis. O'nyongnyong. Nameless São Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.

He calls it speleogenesis by elephants—the creation of a cave by elephants.

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.

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.

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.

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

It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment

The Ebola virus particle contains only seven different proteins—seven distinct types of large molecules arranged in a long braided structure that is the stringy Ebola particle. Three of these proteins are vaguely understood, and four of the proteins are completely unknown—their structure and their function is a mystery. Whatever these Ebola proteins do, they seem to target the immune system for special attack.

It is not really known how Ebola is transmitted from person to person. Army researchers believed that Ebola virus traveled through direct contact with blood and bodily fluids (in the same way the AIDS virus travels).

some people around the Institute were skeptical of her ability to work in a space suit in Level 4. She was a "married female"—and therefore, they claimed, she might panic. They claimed that her hands looked nervous or clumsy, not good for work with Level 4 hot agents. People felt that she might cut herself or stick herself with a contaminated needle—or stick someone else. Her hands became a safety issue. But the real issue was that she was a woman.

What made it particularly interesting was that it multiplied easily in various species, in monkeys, humans, guinea pigs. It was extremely lethal in these species, which meant that its original host was probably not monkeys, humans, or guinea pigs but some other animal or insect that it did not kill. A virus does not generally kill its natural host.

Possibly this epileptic splashing of blood is one of Ebola's strategies for success—it makes the victim go into a flurry of seizures as he dies, spreading blood all over the place, thus giving the virus a chance to jump to a new host—a kind of transmission through smearing.

viruses never go away, they only hide

Lichens are small organisms that often grow on bark and on rocks. A lichen (sounds like "liken") is a fungus growing in association with a species of alga or cyanobacterium, forming a single combined organism.

If you ask a person, "What were you thinking?" you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent.

He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can't cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.)