Book Review

Jolyon Kimble reviews The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston, £17.99, Headline

Richard Preston is a man who loves 'hot' viruses. Viruses that do such intense damage to the human body that they turn people into living pustules, before the victim dies leaving a corpse that often resembles nothing more than a bodybag of black mush. He scored a bestseller in 1995 with The Hot Zone, an appreciation of the Ebola virus, arguably the most vicious of all hot, or Level 4, viruses. It can be described as an appreciation because Preston wrote with such graphic relish about the destruction Ebola wreaked, lovingly recounting the horrors of victims "crashing and bleeding out" through every orifice at the moment of death. It is the combination of such vivid descriptions matched with the compelling cruelty of nature that make Preston so readable.

Now Preston has a new book out, Demon in the Freezer, which takes as its starting point the anthrax attacks in America in late 2001. The book imagines what would happen if these attacks had been launched with smallpox, rather than anthrax, and whether the last stockpiles of smallpox - thought to be limited to two secure labs in America and Russia - really are the last.

The book's most stomach-turning moments come at the beginning, and describe a smallpox (or variola) outbreak in Meschede, northern Germany, in 1970. A student nurse's agonies with Haemorrhagic smallpox are recounted in sickening detail:"Haemorrhagic smallpox is virtually one hundred per cent fatal. The skin does not blister but remains smooth. It darkens until it can look charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets. There was " heavy bleeding from the victim's rectum and the vagina. The nurses tried to get her to rinse the blood out of her mouth with water".

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of smallpox is that victims remain alert and conscious right up until the end.Having convinced us that smallpox is a truly sadistic phenomenon, Preston changes tack and turns his attention to the successful worldwide eradication programme of the 1970s. He spends a great deal of time arguing, successfully, that this was probably the greatest humanitarian enterprise ever undertaken, responsible for saving untold millions of lives.

However, the optimism and relief are short-lived. Preston, as ever, has alarming news.

"'The Russians themselves have told us they lost control of their smallpox. They aren't sure where it went, but they think it migrated to North Korea,'" an American scientist tells him. He also hears explicit evidence that Russia is still working on weaponising smallpox, and developing multiple re-entry warheads to mount on ballistic missiles for the delivery of smallpox spores.

A microbiologist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Richard O Spertzel, also offers frightening testimony."There is no question in my mind that the Iraqis have seed stocks of smallpox," he says, going on to suggest that Iraq had "formally acknowledged" their WMD development as early as 1973.

The scope of Preston's research can't be faulted. His contacts in the microbiology community are as extensive as his access to military complexes. The people he interviews speak frankly of their concerns. The author soon convinces us that the fears of smallpox proliferation are real.He then hits us with a revelation of genetic engineering experiments undertaken in Australia that could unleash a whole new wave of bioterror. Investigations into the immune systems of mice had discovered that isolating a certain gene, IL-4, and splicing it with mousepox produced a "superpox" that broke through the defences of immunised mice. Preston speculates that experiments with human smallpox could be next, and that such experimentation with nature could have catastrophic results.

"No nation that wanted to have nuclear weapons had a problem finding physicists willing to make them," he writes. All the stands between the world and possible meltdown is, he concludes, "a sense of responsibility among individual biologists".

This is a genuinely disturbing book. Some of the gruesome but gripping descriptions of human suffering familiar from Preston's earlier novels have been replaced by dire prophecies that the human race is playing with fire, and this is a much more technical book than previous efforts. It doesn't concentrate so much on character and is less accessible than The Hot Zone, less involving, so it won't be a bestseller on that level. But it could be much more important. Just pray none of it comes true.