- Preston, Richard.
Panic in Level 4.
New York: Random House, 2008.
ISBN 978-0-8129-7560-4.
-
The New Yorker is one of the few remaining
markets for long-form reportage of specialised topics
directed at an intelligent general audience, and Richard
Preston is one of the preeminent practitioners of that
craft working today. This book collects six essays
originally published in that magazine along with a
new introduction as long as some of the chapters which describes
the title incident in which the author found himself standing
space-suit to protein coat of a potentially
unknown hæmorrhagic fever virus in a U.S. Army hot lab.
He also provides tips on his style of in-depth, close and
personal journalism (which he likens to “climb[ing] into
the soup”), which aspiring writers may find enlightening.
In subsequent chapters we encounter the
Chudnovsky brothers,
émigré number theorists from the Ukraine (then part of the
Soviet Union), who built a supercomputer in their New York
apartment from mail-order components to search for structure
in the digits of π, and later used their mathematical
prowess and computing resources to digitally “stitch”
together and thereby make a backup copy of
The
Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries; the mercurial Craig Venter in
the midst of the genome war in the 1990s; arborists and entomologists
tracing the destruction of the great hemlock forests of the eastern
U.S. by invasive parasites; and heroic medical personnel treating the
victims of an Ebola outbreak in unspeakable conditions in Africa.
The last, and most disturbing chapter (don't read it if you're
planning to go to sleep soon or, for that matter, sleep well anytime
in the next few days) describes
Lesch-Nyhan
syndrome,
a rare genetic disease caused by a single nucleotide mutation in
the HPRT1 gene
located on the X chromosome. Those affected (almost all males, since
females have two X chromosomes and will exhibit symptoms only if both
contain the mutation) exhibit behaviour which, phenomenologically,
can be equally well described by possession by a demon which compels
them at random times to self-destructive behaviour as by biochemistry
and brain function. Sufferers chew their lips and tongues, often
destroying them entirely, and find their hands seemingly acting with a
will of their own to attack their faces, either with fingers or any
tool at hand. They often bite off flesh from their hands or
entire fingers, sometimes seemingly in an attempt to stop them
from inflicting further damage. Patients with the syndrome can
appear normal, fully engaged with the world and other individuals,
and intelligent, and yet when “possessed”, capable of
callous cruelty, both physical and emotional, toward those close
to them.
When you get beyond the symptoms and the tragic yet engaging
stories of those afflicted with the disease with whom the author
became friends, there is much to ponder in what all of this
means for free will and human identity. We are talking about
what amounts to a single typo in a genetic blueprint of three
billion letters which causes the most profound consequences
imaginable for the individual who carries it and perceives it
as an evil demon living within their mind. How many other
aspects of what we think of as our identity, whether for good
or ill, are actually expressions of our genetic programming?
To what extent is this true of our species as a whole? What
will we make of ourselves once we have the ability to manipulate
our genome at will? Sweet dreams….
Apart from the two chapters on the Chudnovskys, which have some
cross references, you can read the chapters in any order.
July 2011 