David Quammen Quote
To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn’t do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity—into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny—and not just in the form of frozen samples. You would need to study a raging infection inside somebody’s body. That isn’t easy to arrange. He added: We haven’t had an Ebola patient yet in the US. But for everything that happens, there is a first time.
To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn’t do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity—into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny—and not just in the form of frozen samples. You would need to study a raging infection inside somebody’s body. That isn’t easy to arrange. He added: We haven’t had an Ebola patient yet in the US. But for everything that happens, there is a first time.
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About David Quammen
A collection of Quammen's drafts, research, and correspondence is housed in Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of publicly available literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated from 1856–2014.