“ The boy swelled up, and his skin filled with pockets of blood. In some places, the skin almost separated from the underlying tissue. This happened during the last phase, while he was on the respirator… Richard Preston
“ I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment, and he offered to pick up the sick man i… Richard Preston
“ A zoologist at Humboldt State, Michael A. Camann, climbed in the Atlas Grove and took samples of the fern mats and discovered that they are also sprinkled with tiny aquatic creatures, crustaceans of a… Richard Preston
“ The emergence of Aids, Ebola and any number of other rain forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically… Richard Preston
“ Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth. Richard Preston
“ As for the trees themselves, water that flows into a giant redwood through its roots takes two weeks or longer to reach the top of the tree, moving slowly upward through the tree’s sapwood. Richard Preston
“ Suddenly he goes into the last phase—the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has crashed and bled out. Or more p… Richard Preston
“ Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the p… Richard Preston
“ In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature… Richard Preston
“ In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over th… Richard Preston
“ A policy of moving out and doing it, and asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied. Richard Preston
“ Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue tur… Richard Preston
“ The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the… Richard Preston
“ To stand for periphery. It is hard to ignore the ubiquity of pi in nature. Pi is obvious in the disks of the moon and the sun. The double helix of DNA revolves around pi. Pi hides in the rainbow and s… Richard Preston
“ When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying. Richard Preston
“ They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the e… Richard Preston
“ It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty. Richard Preston
