The Demon in the Freezer

by Richard Preston

Chance favors the prepared mind. —LOUIS PASTEUR

Heraclitus said that when a man dies, a world passes away.

Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.

Officially, the smallpox virus exists in only two repositories: in freezers in a building called Corpus 6 at Vector in Siberia, and in a freezer in a building called the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. But,

Anthrax does not spread as a contagious disease—you can’t catch anthrax from someone who has it, even if the victim coughs in your face—but smallpox could spread through North America like wildfire.

Cytokines are messenger molecules that drift in the bloodstream. Cells in the immune system use them to signal to one another while the immune system mounts a response to an attack by an invader. In a cytokine storm, the signaling goes haywire, and the immune system becomes unbalanced and cracks up, like a network going down.

The mind goes sticky in a moment of fear.