Richard Preston > Quotes

“In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans.”
― Richard Preston, the Hot Zone

“Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

“They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.”
― Richard Preston, the Hot Zone

“Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human. The virus exploits the best parts of human nature as a means of travel from one person to the next. In this sense the virus is a true monster.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses—how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“The Ebola war wasn't won with modern medicine. It was a medieval war, and it went down as a brutal engagement between ordinary people and a life form that was trying to use the human body as a means of survival through deep time. In order to win this war against an inhuman enemy, people had to make themselves inhuman. They had to suppress their deepest feelings and instincts, tear down the bonds of love and feeling, isolate themselves from or isolate those they loved the most. Human beings had to become like monsters, in order to save their human selves.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“It is to say that history turns on unnoticed things. Small, hidden events can have ripple effects, and the ripples can grow. A child touches a bat…a woman riding on a bus bumps against someone who isn’t feeling well…an email gets buried…a patient isn’t found…and suddenly the future arrives.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“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 onearth.”
― Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer

“It is fair to say, however, that nature often does whatever is necessary in order to make the most number of experts wrong.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“One way to understand viruses is to think about them as biological machines. A virus is a wet nanomachine, a tiny, complicated, slightly fuzzy mechanism, which is rubbery, flexible, wobbly, and often a little bit imprecise in its operation—a microscopic nugget of squishy parts. Viruses are subtle, logical, tricky, reactive, devious, opportunistic. They are constantly evolving, their forms steadily changing as time passes. Like all kinds of life, viruses possess a relentless drive to reproduce themselves so that they can persist through time.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“In a town in Liberia, a young woman named Fatu Kekula, who was a nursing student, ended up caring for four of her family members at home when there was no room for them in a hospital—her parents, her sister, and a cousin. She didn’t have any protective gear, so she created a bio-hazmat suit out of plastic garbage bags. She tied garbage bags over her feet and legs, put on rubber boots over the bags, and then put more bags over her boots. She put on a raincoat, a surgical mask, and multiple rubber gloves, and she covered her head with pantyhose and a garbage bag. Dressed this way, Fatu Kekula set up IV lines for her family members, giving them saline solution to keep them from becoming dehydrated. Her parents and sister survived; her cousin died. And she herself remained uninfected. Local medical workers called Fatu Kekula’s measures the Trash Bag Method. All you needed were garbage bags, a raincoat, and no small amount of love and courage. Medical workers taught the Trash Bag Method, or variants of it, to people who couldn’t get to hospitals”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“The emergence of Aids, Ebola and any number of other rain forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth, like Mount Elgon. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world’s plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

“A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.”
― Richard Preston

“The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

“A ninety-minute cure for Ebola? A hundred percent efficacy rate, even when the animals were hours from death? Results like this simply don’t happen in pharmaceutical research. It seemed impossible.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“The coast redwood tree is an evergreen conifer and a member of the cypress family. It's scientific name is Sequoia sempervirens. No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree, and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.”
― Richard Preston

“The IRF had just been completed, after nine years of construction. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which in turn is a part of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. The IRF’s mission is to develop experimental drugs and vaccines, called medical countermeasures, that could defeat lethal emerging viruses and advanced biological weapons.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, Nor of the arrow that flies by day, Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“A question has to be asked: If a Level 4 emerging virus spread to a million people in North America, or in any continent, would hospitals be able to handle the patients and give them care? Would epidemiologists be able to trace and break the chains of transmission if a million people were infected?”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“The IRF is the most advanced Biosafety Level 4 research facility in the world, and it is a crown jewel of the National Institutes of Health.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“When she started working at USAMRIID, Hensley had no knowledge of space suits and no interest in working in a hot zone; she planned to do research on a mild virus that causes common colds, especially in children. This kind of cold virus infects many kinds of wild animals. Hensley thought that one of the wild cold viruses could jump out of an animal into a person somewhere on earth and start a global outbreak of a fatal, emerging cold.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“When everybody is in tears, he thought, somebody has to see to what is happening. What are the things that need to be done?”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“You don’t want to cross that bright line, the ethical line, she told herself.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“she describes it, Hensley had a sudden flash of conviction, as a college student, that emerging viruses were going to become the single greatest threat to human health in her lifetime.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“This is how all outbreaks end,” Armand Sprecher, the Doctors’ official in Brussels, said. “It’s always a change in behavior. Ebola outbreaks end when people decide they’re going to end.” In”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“He could now see the problem only too clearly: The local people didn’t believe that Ebola was real. The virus was out there, it was spreading, and the local people would become violent if the team tried to find it. It was very clear to him—after nearly being killed in a village—that his nation was heading for a disaster. All he could do, personally, was just keep working and try to keep his family safe.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“By now, the warriors who stand at the gates of the virosphere understand that they face a long struggle against formidable enemies. Many of their weapons will fail, but some will begin to work. The human species carries certain advantages in this fight and has things going for it that viruses do not. These include self-awareness, the ability to work in teams, and the willingness to sacrifice, traits that have served us well during our expansion into our environment. If viruses can change, we can change, too.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“Doctors Without Borders adheres to an unyielding ethical principle known as “distributive justice.” The principle asserts that all human beings deserve equal access to the best available medical care. Under the principle of distributive justice, every person is entitled to the same care, whether they are rich or poor, powerful or weak. The principle requires that medical resources must be spread out equitably among all patients according to their needs.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come