You know about this if you’ve read The Hot Zone, Richard Preston’s account of a 1989 outbreak of an Ebola-like virus among captive Asian monkeys at a lab-animal quarantine facility in suburban Reston, just across the Potomac from Washington, DC. Filovirus experts express mixed opinions about Preston’s book, but there’s no question that it did more than any journal article or newspaper story to make ebolaviruses infamous and terrifying to the general public. It also led to “a shower of funding,”
