Richard Preston: The Demon in the Freezer

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Although Preston begins his riveting story by recounting the events of October 2001, when anthrax killed five Americans and precipitated a worldwide fear of bioterrorism, the real "demon in the freezer" is smallpox, and it is to this that he devotes most of his latest book.

Preston was the author of The Hot Zone, which brought the Ebola virus vividly to our attention, and some of the real-life characters who appeared in that book also star in this one, notably Peter Jahrling, senior scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and his colleague, microscopist Tom Geisbert.

To a large extent, we tread the same corridors, spend time inside the same high-security labs, inside the same high-security space suits, having the same kind of near-misses with scissors, needles and germs as we did in Hot Zone, and enduring the same kind of gruesome, step-by-step descriptions of a disease's destruction of a human body.

Preston's sense of awe for the men and women who work with these super-dangerous viruses is palpable, and he'll always tout for American heroism and purity of spirit - but there's no doubt he tells a thrilling story, and his research is incredibly thorough (he even thanks his fact checker in his acknowledgments).

The story of smallpox, though, goes far beyond today's high-security labs, unfortunately, and back into the history of the 20th century. Well, smallpox, of course, has been plaguing the human race for thousands of years.

But in 1979, in a triumph for medicine and modern epidemiology, the World Health Organisation officially declared it eradicated, with the last naturally occurring case of it having appeared in 1977.

Today, officially only two laboratories, known as the Collaborating Centres, keep frozen samples of the smallpox virus, variola: the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta in the US, and at the Russian Virology and Biotechnology Research Centre - known as Vector - in Siberia.

But as Jahrling says, "If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp."

And so we come to the most terrifying part of Preston's book: his revelation - thanks largely to the testimonies of Soviet bio-weapons defectors - that in the 1980s Russian biological warriors actually produced the variola virus by the ton, as well as tons of "heated-up" plague virus - that is, a GM plague that had been exposed again and again to antibiotics to force the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains - for use on warheads.

"It is now clear that the Soviet bioweapons programme was quite advanced by the time the Soviet government fell, in December 1991," Preston writes. "A couple of years earlier, in 1989, at a military facility known as the Zagorsk Virological Centre, about 30 miles northeast of Moscow, biologists were making and tending a stockpile of 20 tons of weapons-grade smallpox. This is absolutely extraordinary, considering the security arrangements that prevail around the little collection of smallpox vials in Atlanta ... "

Worse, though, is that no one seems to know what happened to those many tons of frozen smallpox, or the biowarheads. Preston strongly suggests those reserves escaped destruction and found their way out of the country - possibly into the hands of rogue states such as North Korea, or into the possession of Osama bin Laden, or the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan. Iraq almost certainly has seed stocks of smallpox, according to Richard Spertzel, the head of the United Nations' biological-weapons inspection teams in Iraq between 1994 and 1998.

Preston leaves us in no doubt as to the horror of smallpox. Smallpox, he points out, is not a tactical weapon - that is, it can't, like anthrax, be used in a closely targeted, limited attack. Rather, it is highly contagious, designed to go out of control, killing large numbers of people indiscriminately.

The present vaccine is not perfect and produces adverse results in a small percentage of the population. Debate rages between those, like Jahrling, who want to conduct research with official smallpox stocks to find a better vaccine, and others who think that where possible all stocks of the disease should be destroyed as an example to the world.

In a final vision of horror, he discusses the possibility of genetically altering variola to create a superpox that would be resistant to the present vaccine. A researcher who is doing just this with mousepox told Preston: "The only difficult part of it is getting the smallpox. If somebody has smallpox, all the rest of the information for engineering it is public."

At this point in the book, you really just want Preston to shut up, as if he's giving too many secrets away. But it's too late. As he says, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a superpox." The wrong people are probably all too aware of the recipe.

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