Aetiology

I had ended up with a ratty old piece of Army gear, a space suit that belonged to nobody A little voice started speaking in my head. What are you doing here? the voice said. You're in an Ebola lab in a fucking defective space suit. I started to feel giddy. It was an intoxicating rush of fear, a sensation that all I needed to do was relax and let the fear take hold, and I could drift away on waves of panic, screaming for help.

Martha was looking into my eyes again.

The little voice went on: You're headed for the Slammer.

Richard Preston opens his new publication, a collection of essays titled Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, killer viruses, and other journeys to the edge of science, with a quotation: "In order to know soup, it is not necessary to climb into a pot and be boiled." Preston disagrees with the sentiment, expressed by English mathematician and physicist Oliver Heaviside. Preston discusses how he, as a journalist, has created a living by jumping into the soup--even though it's sometimes scared the piss out of him, as described in the excerpt above (the "panic" described in the title). However, Preston fans should be cautioned that this all isn't typical Preston fare. More after the jump...

Preston has hit it big previously writing non-fiction about science and disease, most notably with 1994's The Hot Zone (on Ebola and Marburg) and 2002's The Demon in the Freezer, on the topic of biological warfare (and especially smallpox and anthrax, coming shortly on the heels of the 2001 anthrax attacks). Preston has made his mark by writing non-fiction about microbes that reads like a thriller: intense, suspenseful, and often graphic (and, say some critics, overly dramatized and exaggerated in places). Nevertheless, it's hard to argue that Preston's books aren't good reads.

Lesser known are Preston's other non-fiction works, covering topics such as the steel industry and the canopies of the world's tallest Redwoods. Because fewer people are aware of Preston's writings on topics other than infectious disease, and because of the title of the book, it will probably come as a surprise to many Preston fans that the book is a collection of essays first published in the New Yorker. Yes, they cover infectious diseases--the opening chapter is from where the title is drawn, describing Preston's time in a BSL4 laboratory while researching "The Hot Zone"--but readers will also find essays that describe the construction of a supercomputer to examine the the digits of pi--within a New York apartment; a profile of genomics heavyweight Craig Venter; and yes, an essay on Ebola and Marburg, among other topics covered in the anthology.

The essays themselves range from decent to pretty good--not Preston's best writing, in my opinion, but good for a summer take-along book when you're looking for bite-sized pieces of entertainment. However, what would have much improved the book was to have some kind of over-arching theme to show how these seemingly disjointed pieces of work were all part of the bigger picture of "the edge of science," as the subtitle announces. For example, how might Venter's work on the human genome project contribute to researchers' studies described in the final chapter, working on a strange disease that causes sufferers to cannibalize themselves? What might the new generations of supercomputers have in store for investigations of mysterious agents such as Ebola? While I found the essays included interesting, surely Preston could have taken a bit of time to give us a "bigger picture" view of the work included in the book.

However, it unfortunately seems that Preston wasn't very involved in bringing this publication to press. The essays weren't updated with the latest research findings (for example, the essay on Ebola still says that filoviruses weren't found in bats, which is is no longer the case). This is a shame, and coupled with the title has led some reviewers on Amazon to feel a bit shortchanged and victims of a bait-n-switch. However, if you're up for a bit of Preston branching out beyond his best-known subject matter, this would be a good one to grab from the library or borrow from a friend.