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...
My virologist friends are always bioengineering viruses. I could see a bioengineered strain of smallpox getting into a terrorist’s hands, and that’s my fear. And then when we get a terrorist attack wi...
And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, Chance favors the prepared mind.
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...
Farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from
But no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.
Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of v...
A good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.
Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiolo...
If people learned what this virus could do, there would be traffic jams heading out of Reston, with mothers screaming at television cameras, Where are my children?
Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can tur...
C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you...
When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved wit...
Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular c...
Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver
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.
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...
Reaches a cell wall, it disintegrates into hundreds of individual virus particles, and the broodlings push through the cell wall like hair and float away in the bloodstream of the host. The hatched Eb...
The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue.
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,
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