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

headquarters in Geneva to put together such a program.
"What if I don't want to go?"
"You're ordered to go," Watts said.
"Suppose I refuse?"
"Then you will resign from government service."
Henderson assumed that the attempt to eradicate smallpox would fail in about eighteen months.
He told his wife, Nana, and their three children that they were going to stay in Geneva for a little while,
until the program fell apart and they could come home. They put most of their things in storage in Atlanta
and arrived in Geneva on the first of November. The Henderson family settled into a bungalow near
Lake Geneva, not very far from the town where variola had been given its official name in A.D. 580, and
they rented a refrigerator, since D.A. felt they weren't going to be there long. They would not see their
stored things for another twelve years.
The Eradication program was built on the idea that variola has one great weakness: it is able to
replicate only inside the human body. People have become its only natural host. Wherever it had come
from in nature, it had actually lost the ability to infect its original host, and indeed, perhaps its original host
had gone extinct. Variola had no reservoir of hosts in nature in which it could hide and continue to cycle
if there was an attempt to eradicate it from people.
When people were infected with vaccinia, the mild cousin of smallpox, their immune systems
became able to recognize variola and fight it off. If the human species could be widely infected with
vaccinia and in just the right way, then vaccinia could, in effect, supplant variola in the human host.
Driven out of its host by rival vaccinia, variola would have no niche left in the ecosystems of the earth.
This was, in fact, a daring plan, since no one could claim to understand the structure of natural
ecosystems, especially in microbiology, or to have a clue as to whether the strategy would really work.
Nature is full of surprises. Henderson wondered, for example, if smallpox just might have a little
unnoticed reservoir somewhere in rodents. If so, that would destroy the dream of eradication, for
humans have never been any good at getting rid of rodents. Henderson asked a virologist named James
Steele if he thought any animal anywhere could harbor smallpox. Steele answered emphatically, "No.
You will not find an animal reservoir." Henderson couldn't quite believe this, and for years the
eradicators searched the world for a rodent, a bird, a lizard, a newt, anything with variola. They found
no animal carrier of smallpox. Variola could not even replicate in primates, the closest relatives of
humans. But then, in 1968, to the surprise of the eradicators, a previously unknown virus called
monkeypox was discovered in a group of captive monkeys in Copenhagen, and the virus was traced
back to the African rain forest, where to this day monkeypox infects humans. Monkeypox is an
emerging virus that is making trans-species jumps into people in smoldering outbreaks in the rain forests
of the Congo. Monkeypox may or may not one day take the natural place of smallpox vis-├а-vis the
human species.
Despite the evident fact that smallpox was restricted to a single host-people-many leading
biologists believed that the eradication of any virus was a hopeless task. They held the opinion that it was
impossible to separate a wild microbe from the ecological web it lived in. This view was expressed in
1965 by the evolutionary biologist Ren├й Dubos, in his book Man Adapting. "Even if genuine eradication
of a pathogen or virus on a worldwide scale were theoretically and practically possible," Dubos wrote,
"the enormous effort required for reaching the goal would probably make the attempt economically and
humanly unwise." His belief was sensible and rational, it was held by most biologists of the time-and it
was wrong.
When the program began, the World Health Assembly set a deadline of ten years for its
completion. "President Kennedy had said we could land a man on the moon in ten years," Henderson
said, and so it should be possible to wipe out variola in the same amount of time. At first, the leaders of
the Smallpox Eradication Program weren't sure how to go about the job. They set a goal of vaccinating
eighty percent of the population of countries that harbored smallpox, but that proved to be virtually
impossible. They also developed the surveillance-andring-vaccination containment method. They