Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science (5 page)

Jeremy shuffled over to a shelf and got a box of Froot Loops cereal. Eighty-seven became excited.

Jeremy handed me the box and suggested that I give some of the cereal to Eighty-seven, to help make friends with him. I pulled a couple of Froot Loops out of the box. Keeping my eyes averted respectfully, for Eighty-seven was a dominant male and would become angry if I looked at him (in monkey language, staring is the equivalent of giving the finger), I placed the Froot Loops on my palm and held out my hand. The monkey’s arm shot out of the cage, and he plucked the cereal from my palm and crammed it into his mouth, and then held out his hand for more. He might have been able to tear my space suit if he had wanted to, but once I had offered him Froot Loops he became friendly. I offered him more Froot Loops. He kept shoving his hand out for more. A Froot Loop fell to the floor, and Eighty-seven followed it with his eyes, looking wistful, I thought. He put out his hand for more.

The Army people had become fond of the monkeys. Their feeling was that any monkey that had survived Ebola should be allowed to live out the rest of its days in peace. In addition, the survivors’ blood contained immune antibodies to the viruses, which could be used in experiments. But the monkeys could not leave the hot zone, because there was a worry that they might still be silent carriers of the viruses that had once infected them. “BASICALLY, NOBODY KNOWS MUCH ABOUT EBOLA OR MARBURG, SO WE DON’T KNOW IF THE MONKEYS COULD INFECT ANYONE WITH THESE VIRUSES EVEN AFTER THEY’VE RECOVERED FROM THE DISEASE,” Jeremy said.

We said good-bye to the monkeys and returned to the laboratory rooms. Finally it was time to make an exit from the hot zone. I followed the researchers through the maze of corridors and little rooms to the air lock.

Jeremy entered the air lock first and started the chemical shower by pulling on a chain. The shower began running in the air lock, sterilizing the outside of his space suit. While Martha and I waited for Jeremy to finish his chemical shower, I handed her my Level 4 Bic pen. She left it near a computer for the next person to use. Then Martha and I went into the air lock together. She pulled the chain and we stood under the chemical shower. The chemicals gave off a strong but not unpleasant smell, which eventually crept inside my space suit.

Martha pointed to my Teflon paper—my notes—which I held clutched in my glove. “LET ME HAVE THAT FOR A SEC,” she said. She crumpled it up, dipped it into a bath of chemicals, and then, using both hands, she scrubbed the Teflon paper against itself and squeezed it, as if she were rinsing a washrag. After a minute or so, she pulled the paper out of the chemical bath. My notes were wrinkled, wet, and sterile. The shower stopped, and I opened the steel door and stepped into the normal world, holding the notes.

Later, I wrote about Nancy Jaax’s feelings after she had gotten a hole in her space suit and she was standing in the chemical shower, feeling Ebola blood oozing around inside her suit and wondering who was going to pay the babysitter. I constructed the passage primarily from detailed interviews with Nancy Jaax, of course. Yet there is something else in that scene that did not appear in the book. It was an iceberg of personal experience, one I hadn’t felt able to write about until now. I had been in the rooms she had been in. There, I had experienced a breach condition in my space suit, too, and it had happened in the presence of a putative hot Marburg-like Unknown. And I had stood in the same chemical shower afterward, with thoughts and fears pouring through my mind…. I had been boiled in the soup.

I
LOVE EXPLORING UNSEEN WORLDS
. In this book, we are embarking on a deep probe through the realms of the vanishingly small, where, at times, all we can say is “There be monsters.” The chapters in this book were originally published in
The New Yorker,
but I’ve expanded, updated, and linked them.

One monster of the microscopic universe is a mysterious genetic disease, called Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, which is caused by the alteration of a single letter of a person’s DNA code. If one letter of the human DNA is altered in a certain place in the code, the person who is born with the tiny error has a dramatic change of behavior—a lifelong, irresistable compulsion to attack himself, chewing off…it’s in the last chapter.

“The Mountains of Pi” describes David and Gregory Chudnovsky, mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of mail-order parts in Gregory’s apartment in New York City. They were using their homemade supercomputer to calculate the number pi (
) to billions of decimals. They were looking deep into pi, down into an infinitesimal smallness of precision, deeper and deeper into pi, trying to get a glimpse of the face of God.

I originally wrote about the Chudnovskys in a “Profile” for
The New Yorker.
When I first met them and began researching the piece, they seemed pleased that I was writing about pi, but they soon got the idea that I was also writing about
them.
They began to object. “My dear fellow, can’t you leave our names out of this?” David said.

I had to explain that it is not really feasible to leave a person’s name out of a
New Yorker
“Profile” of him.

This puzzled me, why the Chudnovskys didn’t want their names used. The answer, as I finally figured out, had to do with the nature of mathematics as a human activity. Mathematics is not strictly science, nor is it absolutely art. Mathematics is both objectively rigorous and highly creative, and so it spans the divide between the two worlds, and expresses the unity of science and art. In effect, mathematics is a cathedral of the intellect, built over thousands of years, displaying some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit. The Chudnovsky brothers saw themselves as anonymous workers adding a few details to the cathedral. Their names didn’t matter.

When I had finally gotten their reluctant assent to let me write about them as people and had finished drafting “The Mountains of Pi,” a fact-checker from
The New Yorker
named Hal Espen paid a visit to the Chudnovsky brothers in order to verify the facts in my piece. Soon afterward, Gregory phoned me in a state of indignation. Hal Espen had spent a long time in Gregory’s apartment, looking at the things I’d described and asking the brothers many questions. At one point, he wanted to confirm that Gregory owned hand-sewn socks made of scraps of cloth, as I had written, so he asked Gregory if he could see his socks. Gregory wasn’t wearing them, so Espen ended up looking in one of the drawers of Gregory’s dresser, where he found the socks and verified my description of them. “He was a nice guy, but why did he have to rifle through my socks?” Gregory demanded.
^*1
If the names of the cathedral workers didn’t matter, their socks mattered even less. But Gregory Chudnovsky’s socks mattered deeply to me, for the same reason that the color of Nancy Jaax’s eyes and the scar on her hand mattered. The business of a writer, in the end, is human character, human story. Unlike a novelist, a narrative nonfiction writer cannot make up details of character. For the nonfiction writer, details must be found where they exist, like diamonds lying in the dust, unnoticed by passing crowds.

In exploring biology, I moved my focus away from the smallest life-forms—viruses—and began climbing the coast redwood trees of California. The coast redwoods are the largest individual living things in nature. Redwoods can be nearly forty stories tall; they would stand out in midtown Manhattan. In order to climb a redwood, you put on a harness and ascend hundreds of feet up a rope into the redwood canopy. It’s like scuba diving, except that you go into the air. The canopy is the aerial part of a forest, and it is an unseen world, invisible from the ground. Once you have ascended into the redwood canopy, which is the world’s tallest canopy, you dangle in midair, in a harness, around thirty stories above the ground. You are suspended from ropes attached to branches overhead. You move through the air while hanging on ropes, sometimes going from tree to tree. The redwood canopy is a lost world, unexplored, out of sight, teeming with unknown life. After writing a book about it (
The Wild Trees
), I learned of the existence of an unexplored rain-forest canopy in eastern North America; I hadn’t known there were rain forests in the East. This eastern rain forest was being destroyed by parasites invading the ecosystem. It was an unseen world that was vanishing even before it had been explored by humans. Thus an interest in giant life-forms ended up returning me to a focus on small things: “A Death in the Forest.”

“The Search for Ebola” is about the search for the unknown host of the Ebola virus, and it narrates an outbreak of Ebola in Congo. In researching it, I ended up talking with a medical doctor named William T. Close. Bill Close, who is the father of the actress Glenn Close, had been the head of the main hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo (then called Zaire). Then, while I was staying late in the offices of
The New Yorker
on a Friday night—closing time, when the magazine is put to bed—I telephoned Dr. Close for a last-minute fact-checking conversation. In about ten minutes (I had been told) the magazine would be closed—finished—and would be transmitted electronically to the printing plant in Danville, Kentucky. That was when Dr. Close told me the story of a Belgian doctor who had performed a terrifying act that could be called an Ebola kiss, with a patient in an Ebola ward.

“Oh, my God,” I blurted.

I asked someone to go find Tina Brown, the editor, and see if the magazine could be held open for a little while, as a doctor was saying something. It was okay with Brown, but there was no time to take notes. I asked Close to tell me the story again, while I scrawled sentences describing the Ebola kiss on a sheet of paper. With Close waiting on the line, I carried the paper over to the make-up department (an office where the magazine’s compositors worked at computer screens) and I handed it to Pat Keogh, the head of make-up, who typed my scrawl into the master electronic proof. Almost immediately, the passage was reviewed for grammar by
The New Yorker
’s grammarian, a quiet person named Ann Goldstein. (Experts who are being quoted in
The New Yorker
are encouraged not to use bad grammar.)

Minutes later, with Bill Close still waiting on the telephone, we heard that his grammar was okay, and we heard that the magazine had been transmitted electronically to the printing plant. I said good night to the now-eponymous Dr. Close and hung up.

That was when something struck me. How could I have been so stupid? I had forgotten to ask Close
what had happened to the Belgian doctor afterward.
He would have died a grisly death. Years later, I learned what had transpired, and you will read it here.

In “The Human Kabbalah,” I explored the decoding of the human DNA and the resulting fantastic stock-market bubble that made the genomic scientist J. Craig Venter a billionaire for a while. One day, while working on this story, I was hanging out in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith—one of the great figures in the history of molecular biology—and I mentioned to him that I was having trouble, as a writer, describing DNA in a physical sense. I wanted readers to get a concrete picture of it in their minds. “The trouble is, DNA is invisible,” I said to Hamilton Smith.

“No, it isn’t,” he said. He asked me if I’d ever seen it. I hadn’t, so he dribbled some purified DNA out of a test tube. It looked like clear snot.

“What does it taste like?” I asked him.

That surprised him a little. He didn’t know. In almost forty years of research with DNA, Hamilton Smith had never tasted the molecule.

As soon as I got home, I ordered some pure, dried DNA through the mail. It arrived: a bit of fluff in a bottle. I put some of it on my tongue. Sure enough, it had a taste. In taking notes, it is useful to remember that all the senses can be involved.

I continued to follow the Chudnovsky brothers and their journeys in the universe of numbers. This led them, with me trailing behind, to the mysterious Unicorn Tapestries, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of New York. All the while, I was researching the curious genetic disease that causes people to mutilate and even, in effect, cannibalize their own bodies—Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

The disease was almost unbearable to contemplate, and at first almost impossible to describe. It made its victims seem inhuman. I couldn’t find a way into the writing of the story, despite spending months and finally years on it. Ultimately, the last chapter of this book took me seven years to write. The disease probably could not be invented by a fiction writer, or if it were invented, it would not seem believable. Yet there it was, an undeniable reality. I needed to understand, if possible, what it might feel like to have this disease. I wanted to try to connect the seemingly unknowable experience of self-cannibalism to that of common humanity. Henry Fielding, in his famous preface to his novel
The History of Tom Jones,
in which he defined the basic terms of fiction writing, quoted Terence: “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” If people with Lesch-Nyhan disease were human, then they could not be alien to us. The only way to find humanity in the story was to climb into the soup with two people who had been born with the disease and start taking notes.