"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

immune.
The St. Walberga doctors took a scalpel, cut a pustule on his skin, and drained a little of the
opalescent pus onto a swab. They put it in a test tube, and a state official got in a Mercedes and drove
the pus at a hundred and twenty miles an hour along the autobahn to a laboratory at the state health
department in Dsseldorf.


Microscope
JANUARY 16, 1970

Karl Heinz Richter was a smallpox expert in the D├╝sseldorf office of the state health department, a
medical doctor with a kindly face and a flop of hair on one side. He wore stylish metal-framed
eyeglasses and a gray sweater under a jacket, which gave him a comfy but up-todate look. Dr. Richter,
along with a team of doctors and technicians, analyzed the pus taken from Peter Los's skin. They put a
little dried flake of the pus in an electron microscope-a tubelike instrument, six feet tall-which could
magnify an image up to twenty-five thousand times. Then they took turns looking into the viewing hood;
they would have to vote on the diagnosis.
Dr. Richter saw a vista of exploded human skin cells. Mixed in with the cellular debris were
thousands of small, rounded bodies that looked like beer kegs. Some experts refer to them as bricks.
The view in the microscope seemed vast, for magnified twenty-five thousand times, the flake of pus
would have been an object nearly the size of a football field, and the little bricks in it lumps the size of
raisins, and there could have been hundreds of thousands of them in the flake. These were virions of a
poxvirus, and the vote was unanimous: this was smallpox.
The pox bricks had a crinkly, knobby surface, rather like a hand grenade-some experts call this
feature the mulberry of pox. (A mulberry is a small fruit, the size of a thumbnail, which looks like a
blackberry.) There are many species and families of poxviruses; smallpox is an orthopox, a poxvirus of
animals. Poxviruses are among the largest and most complicated viruses in nature. A pox particle itself
either makes or consists of around two hundred different kinds of protein, and many of the proteins are
locked together into the particle like a Chinese puzzle. Pox scientists are slowly picking apart the
structure of the mulberry of pox, but so far nobody has figured out the full design. Experts in pox find the
pox virion mathematical in its structure and almost breathtakingly beautiful. At the center of the mulberry
there is an odd shape that looks like a dumbbell, which scientists call the dumbbell core or the dogbone
of pox. Inside the dumbbell, or dogbone, there is a clump of DNA, which is the long, twisted, ladderlike
molecule that contains the genome of smallpox-the complete blueprint and operating software for variola.
The steps of the ladder of DNA are the letters of the genetic code. The genome of smallpox has about
187,000 letters, which is one of the longest genomes of any virus. Smallpox uses a lot of this code to
defeat the immune system of its human host. It has about two hundred genes (which make the virus's two
hundred proteins). By contrast, the AIDS virus, HIV, has only ten genes. In terms of the natural design
of a virus, HIV has a simple design that works well. HIV is a bicycle, while smallpox is a Cadillac
loaded with tail fins and every option in the book.
Poxviruses are one of the few kinds of viruses that are just large enough to be seen in the best
optical microscopes (in which they look like fine grains of pepper). The infinitesimal palaces of biology
extend far into the unseen. It is hard for the mind to grasp just how small is small in the microscopic
universe of nature, but one way is to imagine a scale of nature built on the scale of the Woodstock music
festival, which took place in a natural amphitheater at Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York. It held
up to a half-million people. Seen from low orbit above the earth, the crowd of people at Yasgur's farm
would have looked something like this:
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If a cell from the human body, in its natural size, were placed on this representation of the