Richard Preston will press your buttons in 'Panic in Level 4'
— -- With his 1994 sensation The Hot Zone, science writer Richard Preston terrified millions by describing how the Ebola virus left victims hemorrhaging from every orifice.
In his new book, Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science (Random House, $26), he continues to probe nature's stranger side, including what DNA tastes like and a disease that compels people to chew their own flesh. He talks with USA TODAY.
Q: In Panic, you quote an Ebola expert: "In the battle between the doctors and the bugs, in the long run, I'd put my money on the bugs." Does this mean we're all doomed to die from some horrible virus?
A: I don't believe in a biological apocalypse, but I think there is stormy biological weather ahead as the human population continues to grow. We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb. I think we're going to see an emergency that could really challenge the global medical system and cost a lot of human lives.
Q:What should we do?
A: On the individual level, make sure people are properly vaccinated. The standard flu vaccine may well protect against avian flu or be at least partly effective. Give kids their shots. We should also demand that our local and federal governments spend more money on public health. And third, we need to continue to invest in biotechnology.
Q:Any updates on Ebola?
A: It continues to smolder in Africa. There has been a very recent outbreak of a new Ebola type in Uganda. It was causing symptoms that didn't look like classic Ebola, so doctors didn't know what they were dealing with.
Q:While researching your books, you've had some wild moments — like when your biohazard suit popped open in an Army Ebola lab. What was the scariest moment ever?
A: I was in a 25-story-high tree in a 50-mph windstorm in Victoria, Australia. The tree started vibrating, and the guide who made his living climbing trees looked very scared. (In 2007, Preston published The Wild Trees, a best seller about California's redwoods.)
Q:How did a guy with a doctorate degree in English literature from Princeton end up writing about science?
A: Intellectual schizophrenia. I had written my dissertation on 19th-century American narrative non-fiction writing. I decided to do journalism and do it as an explorer of science. I happen to love science. … Scientists are all slightly mad. There is truth in the stereotype of the mad scientist. They are mad with curiosity.
Q: Writer Douglas Preston is your younger brother. When you were growing up in Wellesley, Mass., you knocked out his two front teeth. Still fighting?
A: We're close friends now. We talk shop a lot. Doug and I were rebels growing up. I was frequently in trouble. I assaulted a teacher in high school. Fortunately, I had a lot of support from my parents, and I stabilized in college, where I developed an intense passion for writing and science simultaneously. (Both attended Pomona College in California.) Our other brother David (a physician in Maine) is the true intellectual of the family.
Q:Are there any areas of science that should be off-limits?
A: I'm all in favor of looking deeply into as much as we possibly can. I'm not afraid of knowledge. … With all new technology, weapons inevitably emerge. … Evil comes out of the human heart. It doesn't come out of nature.
Q:You write about frightening stuff, yet you seem pretty upbeat. Why?
A: I think American innovation is going to cure our addiction to oil, and it's going to create new vaccines and cures to diseases that don't even exist right now. … We get ourselves into messes, but we're also really good in a crisis.