"This book recounts the five-day history of a major American
scientific crisis. As in most crises, the events surrounding
the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and
foolishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly everyone
involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of
unaccountable stupidity...."
Thus begins this
extraordinary novel of the world's first space-age
biological emergency.
The Andromeda Strain sets forth
with almost documentary verisimilitude the unfolding story
of "Project Wildfire" -- the crash mobilization of the
nation's highest scientific and medical resources when an
unmanned research satellite returns to earth mysteriously
and lethally contaminated.
Four American scientists,
chosen in advance for their experimental achievements in the
fields of clinical microbiology, epidemiology, pathology,
and electrolyte chemistry, are summoned under conditions of
total news blackout and utmost urgency to Wildfire's secret
laboratory five stories beneath the Nevada desert. There --
surrounded by banks of the most sophisticated
computer-assisted equipment, and sealed off from the outside
world except for a telecommunications link with the national
security apparatus -- they work against the threat of a
worldwide epidemic to find an antidote to the unknown
microorganism that has inexplicably killed all but two
inhabitants (an elderly derelict and an infant) of the tiny
Arizona town where the satellite was retrieved. Step by step
they begin to unravel the puzzle of the Andromeda Strain,
until, terrifyingly, their microbacterial "adversary"
ruptures the hypersterile seal of the laboratory and their
already desperate search for a biomedical answer becomes a
split-second race against an atomic deadline.
With
its narrative force, its scientific detail, its suspense --
as four brilliant individualists work together under
ultimate pressure -- this novel makes real for the reader
the real world of today's science and medicine at the
top-secret levels of the Science-Space-Military high
command.
The author is a trained scientist. Newspaper
stories from NASA that have appeared since the completion of
the manuscript read like details from The Andromeda
Strain...
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