scientists must act to control their research and their community of scholars

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	• The Demon in the Freezer Richard Preston Fawcett, 2003 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 119 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great read! Fast-paced and interesting without being too technical

Demon in the Freezer was an awesome peek into the history of smallpox and some scientists' concern that sample still exist today and may be used in a bioterrorist attack. I think it is fascinating and inspiring that a small group of people were able to organize and energize a global effort to eradicate an organism that is too small to see with the naked eye. Having lived without the fear of smallpox, reading this book made me understand what a truly amazing feat eradication was. It also gave me hope that we may again be able to mobilize our global health effort to extinguish other diseases and illnesses that affect the world today.

Preston's writing is technical and efficient, but thoroughly explained so everyone can understand smallpox, its transmission and the danger it may still pose today. The book is fast-paced and moves quickly through time and space without seeming disjointed. This book opened my eyes to Richard Preston, and I have already read Hot Zone and plan to read others. Definitely a great read!

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it is only a matter of time

OK. I'm a nurse and I read all things medical. Whether nonfiction or fiction, I buy them, read them, think about them. Yeah, this was scary about the smallpox, but my gosh, the author hopped aroudn describing mundane details when he should have been focused on the big picture.
Who has smallpox now? I think someone knows or can conjecture. Very scary.
I do belive a bio weapon is going to be deployed in the not too distant future --it is probably sadly inevitable. But I did like the book despite the fact that it needed some tight editing.

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Looming smallpox?

Although smallpox was eradicated in nature, Preston explains the very real threat of this vicious virus. Preston explains how smallpox could be used as a bioweapon, and the reality behind its "limited storage" at the CDC and in Siberia. He explains how this virus may be in the hands of other countries or terrorists groups. This book is easy to read and again, Preston does such a good job of taking science, and real life events and making them into a "can't put it down" narration. If you enjoy this book, I would highly recommend Ken Alibek's "Biohazard" book. Since he was the brains behind the Soviet Union's bioweapon research/production he gives an explanation to what was going on at that time and the threat that is still out there. Both great reads!

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The Ultimate Threat

Preston makes the subject understandable, readable and enormously terrifying. He brings to popular literature the grotesque reality of the achievements of the Soviet bio-weapon work, long ignored by most of the academic community. While the Soviets are not considered a threat the lessons of their massive research effort are too widely known to not be a potential foundation for current efforts.

The author does a great job in describing the process of taking an already deadly threat and engineering it into an even more dangerous threat using commonly available technology and knowledge. Forget the massive arrays of centrifuges needed for production of weapons grade nuclear materials. This is stuff that can be done in something not much more sophisticated that the typical meth lab once the bio-engineering is completed.

In addition to the threat of the disease, its impact on the population would be catastrophic. The problem of containment in a mobile, self centered population almost guarantees that geographic quarantine of an exposed population will not work. Our personal resources and attitudes would be a great friend of the epidemic.

Without protection for health workers and those who are needed to deliver food and other essentials a total breakdown of civil order is almost assured.

There are no easy answers but what is clear is that wishing the threat will go away and ignoring the need to research better options for handling it when it comes will be judged harshly when those who survive write the history of this era.

Highly readable and unforgettable. In an election year it should be one of the topics up for discussion rather than the daily drivel.

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scientists must act to control their research and their community of scholars

The book reads like a detective novel, engrossing, addictive, don't pick it up unless you have the time to finish it.
On the surface the book is about two diseases: smallpox and anthrax. The structure is a bit odd and confusing, the anthrax in the senate office building and postal service forms brackets, the first and last chapter, while the extended discussion of smallpox forms the center. The book has a little bit of biology that shouldn't confuse anyone, but curiously the book is also about scientists. He has obviously talked to lots of them, is very sympathetic to their goals and desires, and tries to present not just scientists as nerd working in a lab but a human being with children and the usual mix of things that make us human. But this narrative of science, then scientists as human beings has a much more important task, it is his concern that science, in particular genetic science, finds a way to govern itself, to become responsible to the human community for what it does. Simply put, it is the author's desire for scientists to look at the consequences both potential and actual and act in a humane and responsible way to minimize the risks of their work and the research they do.

The narrative is exciting, the human angle both sympathetic and a glimpse into what drives and motivates these bright and dedicated people, but the theme of the community of scholars responsible to the world for what they do, is crucial if his predictions will not become reality. If smallpox is used as a weapon, the human race is going back to a hunter gatherer, dispersed, low population density way of living. Millions if not billions will die in a matter of years, and it will not be a natural thing, but a human caused one that can only be described as mass murder. This is the big overarching principle take home message of this excellent book. Those who know about these things, must become part of the political/social quest for a way to control scientific research. We can find the energy to sacrifice millions of lives for war, now we have to learn how to sacrifice just as much, maybe even more for peace. It's not just a pipe dream, a pie in the sky by and by, but if our culture is to survive in anything likes its current configuration and at the population densities we now have, a binding solution much be found to the issues of genetic manipulation of living creatures in order to produce biological weapons. This book, especially the last chapter (read at least the last handful of pages first) is a decent moving introduction to the essentialness and immediacy of these issues.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

?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.

From the Hardcover edition.

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