The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Preston writes a compelling non-fiction work about infectious disease, his second. The book begins with a description of the mysterious anthrax bioterrorism attacks of 2001. The victims were some politicians, their staff, mail handling personnel, and one random woman believed to have contracted the disease from her own mail which had been sorted in proximity to a contaminated letter full of anthrax spores. I thought it would be a cracking good real crime story detailing how the FBI and the scientists who helped them cracked the case. Much of the book is about that case, but the case was not solved by the time the book was published and the book does not identify any individual to be the perpetrator. Most of the book focuses on smallpox, specifically the weaponization of smallpox. The history of smallpox as a disease and then as a weapon is fascinating and well depicted. The author humanizes it by describing the laboratory procedures various scientists use to deal with samples or treatment of patients, and he provides the back stories, i.e. brief bios, of the scientists and doctors along the way.
There’s a lot of good science in the book and some tense moments that demonstrate how easily a smallpox epidemic could start that would wipe out forty percent of humanity. Still, a lot is unknown about whether there is a credible bioterror threat. Scientists disagree. The author comes just short of pointing the finger at a particular scientist as the perpetrator of the anthrax attack, but that person turned out not to be person the FBI eventually identified. The book quotes several scientists as stating with great certainty that Saddam Hussein definitely has a stock of weapons of mass destruction, i.e. biological weapons, but one year after the book was published, the U.S. invaded Iraq and found no evidence of such weapons. The book may be relegated to irrelevance as it is over twenty years old now, but the Covid pandemic showed how relevant it still is. A global pandemic is a genuine threat whether occurring naturally, accidentally, or intentionally. The difficulties involved in defending against it, both in the labs and in the outside world are made evident in the book. Smallpox is supposed to exist solely in two closely guarded facilities in the world, one in the U.S., one in Russia, but the book shows how that belief is probably a pipe dream. The development of antiviral medicines against AIDS and HIV give us hope that something similar could be done with smallpox, but the death toll would probably be devastating in any event.