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True Story of the smallpox being kept alive in freezers in nationally funded labs.
Fawcett
April 2003
304 pages
ISBN: 0345466632
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
"The bard of biological weapons captures
the drama of the front lines."
-Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy
The first major bioterror event in the United States-the
anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for
scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of
protecting civilian populations against biological weapons.
In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book
since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard
Preston takes us into the heart of Usamriid, the United
States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters
of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the
epicenter of national biodefense. Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry
virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s
most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance
that gives him access to top secret information on
bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug
that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from the
planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern
science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in
only two high-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease
Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology
institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has
been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks
are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and
North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that
biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to
create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all
vaccines. Usamriid went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11
and activated its emergency response teams when the first
anthrax letters were opened in New York and Washington,
D.C. Preston reports, in unprecedented detail, on the
government’s response to the attacks and takes us into the
ongoing FBI investigation. His story is based on interviews
with top-level FBI agents and with Dr. Steven Hatfill. Jahrling is leading a team of scientists doing
controversial experiments with live smallpox virus at CDC.
Preston takes us into the lab where Jahrling is reawakening
smallpox and explains, with cool and devastating precision,
what may be at stake if his last bold experiment fails.
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