The Devil in the Freezer
About This Novel
In October 2001, less than a month after the "9/11" incident, the United States suffered its first major bioterrorism incident: anthrax attack. In "The Devil in the Freezer," Richard Preston takes us inside the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, once the headquarters for U. S. Bioweapons development and now the center of the nation's biodefense. For Peter Yellin, a top virologist at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, his most urgent task was developing a drug to fight smallpox. The smallpox virus claimed more than 1 billion lives and changed the course of world history. In 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the earth, which was one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. Currently, smallpox strains are contained in high-security freezers at two locations: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and a virology institute in Siberia. But the demon in the freezer has been unleashed. Biologists in clandestine laboratories are almost certainly using genetic engineering to create a new supervirus, a smallpox virus that is resistant to all vaccines.
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