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

who drives everything, but often you don't see him or realize what a force he is.
Henderson, for his part, was a little put off by Brilliant's white dress and his talk of a guru
predicting a wipeout of smallpox. That day, Henderson wrote a note in the employment record, "Nice
guy, sincere. Appears to have gone native."
Back at the ashram, Blanket Baba kept throwing apples at Brilliant's testicles. The situation was
actually rather complicated. Indira Gandhi was herself a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, and she had
visited him at the monastery, where she had bowed down to him and touched his feet and asked for his
advice. Blanket Baba wanted smallpox pulled up by the roots, and he was annoyed at Mrs. Gandhi for
resisting the efforts of the World Health Organization to get on with the job. In fact, Neem Karoli Baba
was probably the most powerful and feared mystic among the leaders of India; many of them journeyed
to touch his feet and seek advice when they assumed high office. He had advised Indira Gandhi in 1962,
when China invaded Indian territory in the Himalayas not far from his ashram. He had told her not to go
to war with China because, he said, the Chinese army would soon withdraw from India anyway. The
Chinese did partially withdraw their army, and Blanket Baba got a reputation for being able to predict the
future. Larry Brilliant's trips to New Delhi were a small part of the guru's continuing effort to help India
realize its future. The uprooting of smallpox, in the view of the guru, was the duty of India and was the
world's destiny.
Brilliant thought he'd increase his chances of getting a job if he looked more Western, so every
time he returned to New Delhi he trimmed off some of his beard and shortened his ponytail, and he
began to replace articles of clothing. He ended up with medium-long hair and a short beard, and he was
dressed in a checkered polyester suit with extra-wide lapels, a thick polyester tie, and a lime green
Dacron shirt. He had made himself unnoticeable, for the seventies. By that time, Nicole Grasset had
decided to hire him, and D. A. Henderson agreed that he might have some potential as an eradicator. He
started as a typist.
Eventually, they sent Brilliant to a nearby district to handle smallpox outbreaks, where if he got
into trouble they could pull him out quickly. He saw his first cases of variola major. "You can't see
smallpox and not be impressed," he said. He began to organize vaccination campaigns in villages. He
would go into a village where there was smallpox, rent an elephant, and ride through the village telling
people in Hindi that they should get vaccinated. People didn't want to be vaccinated. They felt that
smallpox was an emanation of the goddess of smallpox, Shitala Ma, and that therefore the disease was
part of the sacred order of the world; it was the dharma of people to have visitations from the
disease.tBrilliant haunted the temples of Shitala Ma, because inside those temples people with smallpox
could be found praying and dying. He would look up the local leaders, take them to a temple, chant in
Sanskrit with them, and then ask for their help in dealing with smallpox. Speaking in Hindi, he told
people that his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taught that smallpox could be wiped out: "Worship the goddess
and take the vaccine," he told them.
Brilliant traveled all over India with Henderson and the other leaders of the Eradication, and they
came to know one another intimately. "D.A. read nothing but war novels and books about Patton and
other great generals in history," Brilliant said. "Nicole Grasset read nothing except scientific things. Bill
Foege was reading philosophy and Christian literature-he's a devout Lutheran. I was reading mystical
literature." They ran a fleet of five hundred jeeps. They had a hundred and thousand people working for
the program, mostly on very small salaries. For a year and a half, at the peak of the campaign, every
house in India was called on once a month by a health worker to see if anyone there had smallpox.
There were a hundred and twenty million houses in India, and Brilliant estimates that the program made
almost two billion house calls during that year and a half. The Lions Club and the Rotary Club
International paid huge amounts of the cost of eradicating the virus in India. "Those business guys with
their lapel buttons did this amazing thing," Brilliant says.
After he helped to eradicate smallpox, Larry Brilliant did other things: he became one of Jerry
Garcia's physicians; he became the founder and co-owner of the Well, a famous early Internet operation;
he became the CEO of SoftNet, a software company that reached three billion dollars in value on the