The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have deve...
Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.
Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of mur...
He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were.
Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven’t collected a single snake. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in...
Britain’s Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo...
And hopefully nothing will happen. But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It’s just a question of what and when.
An amplifier host is a creature in which a virus or other pathogen replicates—and from which it spews—with extraordinary abundance. Some aspect of the host’s physiology, or its immune system, or its p...
Not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976, with Karl Johnson again prominently involved), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), H...
What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.
We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction
Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.
Then there was a new epidemic—of fear, said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the...
Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.
Their result was a model-generated prediction: Given this rate of transmission, given that rate of recovery, given those unrelated mortalities, then . . . an intermediate grade of virulence should com...
The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.
The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.
The order Chiroptera (the hand-wing creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a b...
The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus o...
Soon afterward, in August 2008, another team was dispatched to Uganda, this time including the veterinary microbiologist Tom Ksiazek, a veteran of field responses against zoonotic outbreaks,