**"The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front
lines."--Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy
The first major bioterror event in the United States-the anthrax attacks
in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot"
agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against
biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction
book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard
Preston takes us into the heart of Usamriid, the United States Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick,
Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program
and now the epicenter of national biodefense.
Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist who cut
his teeth on Ebola, one of the world's most lethal emerging viruses, has
ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top secret information
on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will
take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of
the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides,
officially, in only two high-security freezers-at the Centers for
Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology
institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set
loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of
hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by
the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering
to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all vaccines.
Usamriid went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11 and activated
its emergency response teams when the first anthrax letters were opened
in New York and Washington, D.C. Preston reports, in unprecedented
detail, on the government' s response to the attacks and takes us into
the ongoing FBI investigation. His story is based on interviews with
top-level FBI agents and with Dr. Steven Hatfill.
Jahrling is leading a team of scientists doing controversial experiments
with live smallpox virus at CDC. Preston takes us into the lab where
Jahrling is reawakening smallpox and explains, with cool and devastating
precision, what may be at stake if his last bold experiment fails.
