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

horsepox, a pox called Yaba monkey tumor, and a pox called orf. There's dolphinpox, penguinpox, two
kangaroopoxes, raccoonpox, and quokkapox. (The quokka is an Australian wallaby.) Snakes catch
snakepox, spectacled caimans suffer from spectacled caimanpox, and crocodiles get crocpox.
"Generally speaking, when crocodiles get crocpox, you see these bumps on them. I don't think it's
particularly nasty for a croc," a poxvirus expert named Richard Moyer said to me. "My guess is that fish
get poxes, but nobody's looked much for fish with pox," Moyer said.
Insects are tortured by poxviruses. There are three groups of insect poxviruses: the beetlepoxes,
the butterflypoxes (which include the mothpoxes), and the poxes of flies, including the mosquitopoxes.
Any attempt to get to the bottom of the insect poxes would be like trying to enumerate the nine billion
names of God.
Insects don't have skin-they have exoskeletons-and so they can't pustulate. Instead, poxviruses
drive insects mad. A caterpillar that has caught a pox becomes nervous. It staggers around in circles on
a leaf, agitated and losing its balance, and it can't seem to find its way. (This may be a caterpillar's
version of "the anxious face of smallpox.") The caterpillar's development is interrupted, and the caterpillar
keeps on growing bigger, until it is twice normal size. The virus is making its host larger-a nice way for a
virus to amplify itself. Eventually the insect is transformed and destroyed, ending up as a swollen bag
filled with a soup of insect guts and tiny crystalline nuggets that look like Wiffle balls. This soup is
technically known as a virus melt. Each opening of each Wiffle ball in the melt ends up containing a
particle of insect pox. The insect pox virions are inserted into the Wiffle balls and protrude from them
like the knobs on a mine.
The caterpillar dies clinging to a leaf, and splits open, and out pours a spreading virus melt. The
guts decay and are gone, leaving behind the Wiffle balls, which can persist for years in the environment.
One day, a caterpillar comes along and eats the viral equivalent of a land mine, and melts down, and so it
goes for hundreds of millions of years in the happy life of an insect pox.
No fossils of viruses have ever been found in rocks, so the origin of viruses is shrouded in
mystery. Viruses are presumably very ancient, and may be similar to the earliest forms of life that
appeared on the earth more than three and a half billion years ago. The insect poxes may have arisen in
early Devonian times, long before the age of dinosaurs, when the seas teemed with sharks and armored
fish, and the earth was covered with mosses and small plants, and there were still no trees, and the first
insects were evolving. Some experts feel that the poxes of vertebrates could be the descendants of
insect poxes. Smallpox, too, looks like the knobs on the Wiffle ball, though without the ball. Perhaps
there was a trans-species jump of an insect pox into a newt some three hundred and fifty million years
ago. Perhaps the knobs fell off the Wiffle ball when the pox got into the newt, and we are living with the
consequences today.
At least two known midgepoxes torment midges. Grasshoppers are known to suffer from at
least six different grasshopperpoxes. If a plague of African locusts breaks out with locustpox, the plague
is hit with a plague, and is in deep trouble. Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check,
preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of
nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the
natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of
insects. Viruses are nature's crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry. For most of
human history, the human species consisted of small, scattered groups of hunter-gatherers. The human
species did not collect in crowds, and so it was almost beneath the notice of a pox.
With the growth of agriculture, the human population of the earth swelled and became more
tightly packed. Villages grew into towns, and towns grew into cities, and people began to live in crowds
in river valleys where the land was fertile. At that point, the human species became an accident with a
poxvirus waiting to happen.
Epidemiologists have done some mathematics on the spread of smallpox, and they've found that
the virus needs a population of around two hundred thousand people living within fourteen days of travel
from one another or the virus can't keep its life cycle going, and it dies out. Those conditions did not