Rating: 
Summary: Pull the plug
Review: Actually no one in the United States or in the former Soviet Union had the guts to pull the plug at the time of eradication, and so variola, the smallpox virus--the main (but not the only) focus of this rather chilling book--lives on in suspended animation, as it were, awaiting its Pandora. What is worse, some of the virus is thought to be in the hands of potential terrorists who, through the miracle of genetic engineering, are hard at work turboing up the strains they have into weapons-grade killers that can circumvent vaccination immunity. (Which is the reason we can't pull the plug now: we may need the virus to help us develop new vaccines.)According to Preston, Russia is said to have manufactured some 20 tons of the stuff to use in MIRV warheads. (One ounce of pure virus contains more particles than anybody could count in a lifetime.) Some of that is apparently missing. Preston quotes Robert O. Spertzel, who was head of the United Nations biological weapons inspection team in Iraq from 1995-1998, as saying he has no doubt that "the Iraqis have seed stocks of smallpox." (p. 96) To judge from his recent vaccination, it's clear that George W. Bush agrees. Al-Qaeda, whose intrepid flyboys checked out crop dusting planes before their mass murder/suicides, may have the stuff. Certainly they have anthrax, the other main focus of this book, and they wouldn't hesitate to use it. How did we get into this mess? is the question that Richard Preston tries to answer in this terrifying look at biological weaponry. He relates the story of the heroic eradication of smallpox, an eradication unprecedented in medical history, focusing in on the people involved, telling their stories from interviews and news accounts. He explains why the virus was not completed destroyed (mainly due to arguments that we needed it for research) and how some of it is believed to have slipped into the hands of persons unknown. Preston also recounts what is publically known about the anthrax mailings that killed several people and terrified many others. There is some focus on Steven Hatfill who has been intensely investigated by the FBI because of his background in anthrax research. Preston interviewed Hatfill in 1999 prior to the anthrax mailings, reporting that Hatfill had "a great time doing research at" the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He quotes Hatfill as saying, "Where else can you work with monkeypox in the morning and Ebola in the afternoon?" (p. 206) Preston also reports that "Some of Steven Hatfill's claims about himself didn't check out." He had not served in the U.S. Special Forces, and officials from Rhodes University in South Africa denied that the university had awarded him a PhD. (p. 207) Most interesting is Preston's report on page 208 that "The [US] government suddenly removed all of...[Hatfill's] security clearances in August of 2001, two months before the anthrax letters were mailed." What is Preston suggesting? I don't know, but I do know that considering that there were as few as eight suspects and realistically not more than twenty or thirty (see page 200) in the anthrax case, it is a monumental mystery as to why the FBI hasn't found the culprit. One suspects, judging from the deafening silence on the matter from the White House, that something is known that our government doesn't think we ought to hear. My guess is that the FBI knows who did it, but somehow muffed the evidence and now can't prove the case in a court of law and so has put a lid on it for now, hoping for further confirmation. But to return to smallpox, which as a bioterrorist weapon is many times scarier than anthrax. Consider this scenario: Al-Qaeda (or some other terrorist organization) genetically engineers an even more deadly smallpox. They develop a vaccine for themselves and then (as in director Terry Gilliam's 1995 movie Twelve Monkeys) they spread the virus around the world, killing most of humanity. Fantastic? Unthinkable? According to what Preston presents here and what I've read elsewhere, this scenario is entirely possible. It may be said of us sometime in the future, that we were the generation that eradicated the smallpox virus-the worse scourge to afflict humans in our entire history-only to give it new life through biological engineering. Consider this irony of ironies: after spending billions of dollars and countless man hours of hard work to rid the planet of the virus, we now spend thousands of dollars every year just to keep it alive so that it can someday destroy us. Are we crazy or what? Bottom line: a terse, chilling, sharply detailed, but somewhat abortive account of the major threat to human life in existence today, the sort of book no educated person would want to miss.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll lose sleep if you read this
Review: If you wonder why rogue states with bio-war programs must be subdued, this book provides an answer. It begins as a fascinating, frightening history of smallpox - and ends by clearly delineating the threat of smallpox, anthrax and other biological weapons in our modern world.
The ultimate threat of the combination of state weapon development and terrorist groups is driven home with stunning clarity. The threat described is one that must be destroyed at practically any cost if we are to live with a modicum of safety. Jerry
Rating:
Summary: Never mind Ebola.
Review: Forget THE HOT ZONE - the story of smallpox is far more tragic and frightening. Both Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks make appearances in THE DEMON IN THE FREEZER, but the main point of the book is to invite us to follow the heroic scientists who brought smallpox to the brink of extinction, and the sometimes corrupt, sometimes ambiguous forces that not only brought it back, but engineered it into an even more efficient killer that may one day make the Black Plague look like a vision of utopia. As Preston explains, the final suvival strategy of the smallpox virus, once we had brought it to its knees and were about to issue the killing blow, was to lure us with the promise of power. This is a book of inspiring characters but depressing lessons.
Rating:
Summary: Vivid, chilling, important
Review: The subject of Preston's latest book, The Demon in the Freezer, is bioterrorism, and especially the likelihood that genetically enhanced smallpox--superpox--will at some point be unleashed. Preston makes the reader agonizingly aware of how bitterly ironic it would be if smallpox, once humanity's greatest killer and the only disease we have managed to eradicate, is inflicted on humanity deliberately. Terribly ironic, and frighteningly likely. In The Demon in the Freezer, Preston takes the reader on a vivid, intimate, insider's tour of a world very few people get to see--the sealed, pressurized, high-tech labs where space-suited scientists work with the deadliest pathogens nature has evolved (and man has tinkered with). He writes with the clarity and immediacy of someone who has traveled to every site, interviewed everyone involved, and suited up and worked with them in their labs. I didn't enjoy learning just what the autopsy of an anthrax victim reveals, or what the amputated arm of a child who died of smallpox looks like, but these and the other details Preston depicts so strikingly root what he has to say in undeniable reality. This is not a book of policy or theory, but of gory, scary reality. There's nothing pretty about the picture he paints. Preston leaves no doubt that horrendously potent biological weapons exist, that the ability to use off-the-shelf genetic manipulation to make them even deadlier is widespread, and that there are plenty of people, groups, and nations with the motivation to use them. The book made me think that biological weapons will almost inevitably be used--it's just a question of when, which ones, and how well or poorly we will be prepared. In the chilling light of The Demon in the Freezer, the current resistance of healthcare providers to receiving smallpox vaccinations appears unbelievably shortsighted. Concerning the eradication of smallpox through a magnificent, decade-long international effort, Preston writes eloquently, "No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit." Concerning the fact that politicians and scientists failed to destroy the last stashes of smallpox virus, which now leaves all of us vulnerable to its use as a weapon, he adds, " . . . we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go. . . . The virus's last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power. We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart." If you want first-hand knowledge about the life-and-death issues of bioterrorism and prevention, this book is the first one to read. Richard Preston can really write, and he has a lot to say about a life-and-death issue. Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation. (John Wiley & Sons, Sept., 2002).
Rating:
Summary: Terrific
Review: Everybody says, "I couldn't put it down."
I didn't believe it, but it's true, I
couldn't put it down. I stayed up all
night reading it. Preston is a superb
writer. A little warning, however: Don't
read this book if you value your sleep.
You may never have a good night's sleep
again. Preston shattered my complacency.
I now realize just how fragile and
vulnerable our world is. Also, why doesn't D. A. Henderson have his
own national holiday, or at least a few
statues in his honor? The man has saved
more lives than anyone else I can think
of.
Rating:
Summary: If you enjoyed "the hot zone" this is the book for you!
Review: Richard Preston has done it again! The demon in the freezer is a fantastic account of the small pox virus. I could not put the book down, and finished it in days.
This book gives the reader an in depth account on smallpox, and the ramifications of this virus on humanity. I recommend it to anyone interested in hot viruses, or anyone who wants to prepare itself for what may lie ahead for mankind.
Rating:
Summary: Man sows the seeds of his destruction
Review: What begins as a noble undertaking - the wiping out of the scourge of humankind in the guise of smallpox, becomes a greater potential danger for mankind, perpetuated by mankind itself. In a new version of the adage "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" we now find that while we have eradicated a deadly disease in the wild, we have made it infinitely more dangerous in the lab. Preston once again writes about the hazard of bioweapons. This time he uses the recent anthrax scare as the launching point to discuss man's use of technology to create deadlier and deadlier biological weapons. With the thread of war with Iraq hanging over our heads, the fear of bioweapon use has not been higher. He then takes this anthrax and steps off from that, as if to say "If you think this is bad, well look behind this curtain." Here Preston begins after his main point - the continued existence of smallpox in two official repositories in the US and Russia, as well as the potential multiple repositories across the world in renegade experimentation. His point - that the world is a very dangerous place, and we stand at the threshold of a new kind of warfare - one that could make the atomic bomb look like a small explosion. Living only a few miles from the CDC, this book struck particularly home. Preston goes on to describe in detail the horror experienced by a victim of smallpox. Then he proceeds to explain the storehouse at the Centers for Disease Control, and more so how experiments have been taking place there with Smallpox, including on the day of September 11, 2001. Had the CDC been a target that date, many of us in Atlanta would not be reading this book today. Unfortunately, I don't think Preston's bouncing between smallpox and anthrax worked as well as he intended. It would have been better if he were to prepare two discreet sections and scare the bejesus out of us with both. Overall, though, he makes you think, worry and sweat a little. Walking away from this book, the reader should be scared and alarmed. But most of all the reader will be informed. Well worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: demons and scientists
Review: I agree with the other reviewers that if you have any taste for medical thrillers, this is a fascinating read. What troubled me, though, is that at the end of the book, the scientists who have been described in intimate and friendly detail for their research on creating an animal model of smallpox are then interpreted as having done something fundamentally evil. And they probably have, but nothing in the story-telling up to that point gave any sort of foreboding spin to the work they were doing. A few facts from this book have engraved themselves on my brain: in the last 100 years of its natural existence, smallpox probably killed a billion people. It is the worst human pathogen, period. It infects only humans. It was eradicated from humans and humanity had the opportunity to destroy it utterly, but some sort of hubris and fear kept us from doing so. Now scientists are playing with it again. Something else occurs to me. The person who spread anthrax in the US last year got his or her supply from within the US research community. Perhaps this person is trying to tell us something about our smallpox supply. Perhaps President Bush knows more about a smallpox danger than he can say. Please God let me be wrong.
Rating:
Summary: EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK NOW
Review: Excellent read... Very informative and scarey as well. Sad to think that mankind is so stupid and we may have to reap this mess he has created in the great weapon laboratories... The 20 tons of weaponized smallpox in Russia was a mind blower... Got your biosuit ready????
Rating:
Summary: An enjoyable, yet scary ride!
Review: As much as I enjoyed reading The Demon in the Freezer, I came away from it somewhat disappointed. Don't get me wrong - it is an excellent book that is easy to read and difficult to put down, but it has some fairly large flaws that plague it (no pun intended). I get the feeling that the book was once much larger, and that it was cut down significantly during the editing process. Some of the chapters seem to be only loosely connected to the book as a whole. The author also takes us down a few roads of inquiry only to leave us at a dead end. In one glaring example, the author appears to suggest that former USAMRID scientist Dr. Steven Hatfill may have had some role in the recent Anthrax scare. After teasing us with some evidence that certainly poses some questions about Dr. Hatfill, the author abruptly ends all mention of him. It should also be mentioned some of the information in this book has been published by the author previously elsewhere - some of it word for word. In fact, the main title of the book -The Demon in the Freezer - was the title from the authors essay on smallpox and bioterrorism in the New Yorker (July 12, 1999 pp. 44-61). Dispite some of its flaws, Demon in the Freezer is an important book that should be read.
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