The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs. Richard Preston Read Quote
Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person’s bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn’t remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them. Richard Preston Read Quote
Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope’s mirror is capturing primeval light… galaxies that existed before our time. Richard Preston Read Quote
We’re creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It’s like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb. Richard Preston Read Quote
I happen to love science… Scientists are all slightly mad. There is truth in the stereotype of the mad scientist. They are mad with curiosity. Richard Preston Read Quote
An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree. Richard Preston Read Quote
If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what’s known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, miles deep, around a focus of a virus. Richard Preston Read Quote
The annual flight of the dragonflies goes mostly unnoticed, though it is one of the great migrations of flying creatures that occur across North America. Richard Preston Read Quote
Green darners never attack people, but they have been seen bringing down hummingbirds. They are the Bengal tigers of the microworld. Richard Preston Read Quote
Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators. Richard Preston Read Quote
