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

were stunned to discover that she had smallpox.
Mr. Parker came down with a fever twelve days after he had driven Janet home in his car, and as
he was breaking with variola he died of a heart attack. Janet died of kidney failure in early September.
She had been vaccinated for smallpox as an adult, twelve years before she died, but her immunity had
worn off. Janet's mother broke with smallpox and survived; she was the last person on earth who is
known, publicly, to have been infected with variola. In Somalia, WHO doctors described the deaths in
the Parker family to Ali Maow Maalin, the hospital cook. They say he burst into tears. "I'll no longer be
the last case of smallpox!" he said to them.
Janet Parker had worked in a darkroom on the third floor of a building at the medical school of
the University of Birmingham. One floor below her darkroom, and down the hall some distance, a
smallpox researcher named Henry Bedson was doing experiments with variola. Bedson was a thin,
gentle, youthful-looking man who was internationally known and had established personal friendships
with many of the eradicators. A team of investigators from the WHO was never able to pin down
exactly how Janet Parker became infected, but they believed that particles of the virus had floated out of
Bedson's smallpox room, drifted through a room used for animal research, had then been sucked into the
building's air-vent system, had traveled upward one floor, passed through a room known as the
telephone room, passed through two more small rooms, and finally gotten inside Parker's darkroom, and
had lodged in her throat or lungs.
On September 2nd, as Janet Parker lay desperately ill, Henry Bedson was discovered lying
unconscious in the potting shed behind his house. He had slit his throat with a pair of scissors, and much
of the blood in his body had drained out. He died five days later, despite transfusions.
When Bedson slit his throat, the eradicators woke up to the fact that although the disease was
gone, the virus wasn't, and they stepped up their efforts to gain control of all the known stocks of
smallpox in the world. They felt that as human immunity to the virus waned year by year, the potential for
laboratory accidents was growing.
In 1975, at least seventy-five laboratories had frozen stocks of smallpox virus. Poxviruses,
including smallpox, can survive for many decades in a freezer without damage or loss of infective
potencyprobably for at least fifty years. A freezer with a few vials of smallpox in it could become a
biological time bomb. In 1976, a year before the last natural cases of smallpox occurred, the WHO
formally asked all laboratories holding smallpox to either destroy their stocks or send them to one of the
two Collaborating Centres. The WHO had no legal power to compel anyone to give up their smallpox,
but D. A. Henderson and the others were tough and persistent. One by one, the laboratories that were
keeping smallpox sent their samples to America and Russia or destroyed them or said they had
destroyed them.


Vault

Today, variola exists officially in only two repositories, the Collaborating Centres. One of the
repositories is the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the CDC in Atlanta. The other repository is in
Russia. When scientists handle variola, international rules require them to wear full space suits and to be
inside a sealed Biosafety Level 4 containment zone. The WHO forbids any laboratory from possessing
more than ten percent of the DNA of variola, and no one is officially allowed to do experiments with
smallpox DNA. Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and
difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human
species.
The CDC's smallpox collection sits inside a liquid-nitrogen freezer. The freezer is a
stainless-steel cylinder, about chest high, with a circular lid and a digital temperature display. At the
bottom of the freezer there is a pool of liquid nitrogen, three inches deep, which maintains the air inside
the freezer at a steady temperature of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. There are about four hundred and