Panic in Level 4
I read Richard Preston’s “The Demon in the Freezer : A True Story” long time ago and found it extremely interesting. If all the biology textbook could be so interesting, I am sure many young kids will be inspired to become scientists when they grow up.
This more recent 2008 book by the same author, however, has a somewhat misleading title, because only 1 of the several stories is about ‘level 4′, or microbes that are most lethal including the famous Ebola virus. That doesn’t mean the book is less interesting. In fact, I found the most interesting story in this book is the quest for ‘pi’ by two brothers, Gregory and David Chudnovsky. They are two mathematics geniuses who built a supercomputer in their apartment through mail order parts and with mostly their own money and that from their wives! This story is truly remarkable and full of passion and compassion between people. Of course, the most beautiful part is the passion to pursuit a goal that probably 99.999999% of people on earth will consider as a total waste.
There is also a story about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome that makes people become self-cannibals (ie., consume or destroy their own flesh). I almost couldn’t bear to read the story. These patients are aware of their problem, but they just couldn’t control it. Come to think of this, most of us more or less have this kind of self-destroy tendency. The difference is probably just in degree.
