The Hot Zone
This interesting books talks about the author doing an investigation about several viruses in africa, including ebola. He explains the different strains and tells us their stories.
Stats for nerds
19recommend
36mentions
29people
2009–2026years
56% recommend39% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I just finished Hot Zone by Richard Preston, which is about some of the origins of Ebola and an example case of potential disaster being thwarted by the hair of our chin. Fun read.
- The Hot Zone was an awesome read. Highly recommended.
- I read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Enjoyed both. Think I preferred Into Thin Air.
- You like thrillers? You like non-fiction? You like absolute page-turning non-fiction thrillers?
Check out "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston - it's about the Ebola virus and a strain that wound up in a primate facility just outside of Washington, D.C.
Stephen King called the first chapter "one of the most horrifying things I've read in my whole life." It's so true. Preston caught some flak from CDC scientists for sensationalizing the effects of hemorrhagic viruses, but I think he painted a fairly accurate picture for the layman in all of us: they turn your flesh into soup.
- In virology and other related biological sciences, the opposite is usually the case. All the most cutting edge stuff either happens in university labs or in the private sector.
The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.
Source: I was about an inch away from working at the Defense Intelligence Agency after grad school, but this is why I turned them down. After talking to all the people on the hiring team, this was the consensus. They did it because they loved their country, despite those challenges. And this is what my friends at USAMRIID tell me (US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases). If they want to present anything or publish it, they have months of red tape to go through first. They can't collaborate as easily either.
Also you can read books like The Hot Zone (sensationalized, but shows they weren't doing anything that wasn't happening at the same time in academia) or Ken Alibek's BioHazard, both of which describe the past history of bioweapons research and how it wasn't 10 years ahead of anyone else (in the USSR or the US). It was about where everyone else was, but applying it maybe 2 or 3 years ahead of the game.
- Read “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston. Great book about the origins of Ebola that culminates in an outbreak in Reston, VA that was primarily handled by the military. (The only reason you haven’t heard more about his particular outbreak is that it turned out to be a strain that only affected monkeys (450 at a scientific research holding facility in this case).
