50 pages • 1 hour read
The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
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Themes
The Dehumanizing Nature of Viruses
Throughout The Hot Zone, Preston demonstrates the vulnerability of humans in the face of viruses at an individual, societal, and even species-wide level. The very things that connect us and make us human—our complex social lives, our desire to care for one another, our densely populated and globally interconnected cities—create the conditions that allow viruses to spread. Once inside our bodies, they convert our cells into incubators for more viral particles without any concern for, or even awareness of, the human lives they destroy in the process.
Graphic descriptions of the horrible impact of Ebola on human victims, paired with the humbling assertion, “humans are meat” (132), demonstrate that human relationships and personalities are irrelevant to the virus. By asserting that “humans are meat,” Preston denies any exceptionalism to humans, lumping us in with other animal hosts. Repeatedly, he claims that the viruses “liquefy” their victims and their organs (39, 106, 107 108, 112, 217), “dissolve” them (108), or turn them “into soup” (217, 319). In light of the science of Ebola, these claims are somewhat hyperbolic. However, by juxtaposing this harsh reality with deeply sympathetic human stories, Preston emphasizes the radical threat viruses pose not only to human lives, but to humanity’s collective sense of identity. The tragic story of Nurse Mayinga is a case in point. To the reader, she is a young woman on the verge of achieving her dreams. To the virus, she is only a host.
On a social level, Preston emphasizes filoviruses’ particular ability to threaten and exploit healthcare infrastructure. He tells the stories of healthcare workers like Nurse Mayinga and Dr. Musoke, who are infected after treating filovirus patients, and how Ebola “turned the hospital at Maridi into a morgue” during the Sudan epidemic (100). The chain of transmission in Maridi was only broken after medical staff abandoned the hospital and fled; Preston concludes that “it was probably the wisest thing to do” (101). Particularly if the hospital is using dirty needles, hospitals proved the ideal transmission ground for Ebola. A virus that devastates medical facilities, through widespread infection or through total shutdown, as Dr. Musoke’s illness does when it necessitates the shutdown and quarantine of Nairobi Hospital, presents a particularly grim public health picture.
Lastly, Preston seeks to warn that emerging filoviruses could become “a species-threatening event” (111). This concern is first raised due to Nurse Mayinga’s circulation in Kinshasa, again when he interviews Karl Johnson (118) and lastly when he concludes that such an event may be the planet’s “immune system” responding to the threat of so many humans (339). This last analogy brings the theme full circle—not only do viruses call into question the perceived uniqueness of the human species, but from a global perspective it may be that we are the virus.
The overall impact of Preston’s discussion of human vulnerability is to tell readers that people, communities, and the human species are all under threat by emerging diseases, especially the filoviruses. Prior to the book’s publication in 1994, Ebola Virus had killed a few hundred people worldwide. Given the scale of later outbreaks, including the West African Epidemic of 2014 with more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths, some of these warnings have proved prescient.
The Illusion of Viral Agency
Throughout The Hot Zone, Preston pursues the question of viral agency in both a philosophical and a scientific sense.
The question of whether viruses are living things is an old one in the field of biology. Preston says they may be “an ancient form of life, perhaps nearly as old as the earth itself” (91), but he points out that they cannot make copies of themselves without the help of a living host. They are not made up of cells, they don’t grow, and they cannot maintain themselves in a stable state—all key criteria biologists use to define life. To complicate matters further, it’s exceedingly difficult to talk about how viruses behave without ascribing motive and agency to them. The virus “seeks” a host or “wants” to reproduce itself, but of course the virus does not have a brain and is not capable of seeking or wanting anything. Preston’s language conveys this ambiguity. He compares the virus to a “jackhammer,” calling it “strictly mechanical,” and also says, “viruses are molecular sharks, a motive without a mind” (91). This concept of motive without mind goes a long way toward explaining the sense of the uncanny that surrounds viruses—they occupy a liminal space between living and non-living. Their behavior—profoundly destructive from a human perspective—gives every appearance of singular will and focus while in reality they have no will at all.
When discussing Marburg virus, Preston warns of future potential outbreaks by saying, “When a virus is trying, so to speak, to crash into the human species, the warning sign may be a spattering of breaks at different times and places. These are microbreaks” (60). His qualification, “so to speak” indicates that he knows viruses cannot “try” anything because they cannot intend. Microbreaks can nonetheless signal the potential for future outbreaks. Of the species-jumping activities of Marburg virus, he also writes, “It did not know what humans are” (132). Filoviruses do not know or care about humans and do not hold infecting humans as a lofty goal; indeed, they don‘t even find them to be optimal hosts, as they die too quickly to spread the virus to many other hosts. A virus, Preston concludes, can be deadly while being impersonal, and this is perhaps most terrifying of all because it is most threatening to the human sense of mastery over nature.
Not surprisingly, given their murky ontological status, there remain more scientific questions about viruses than there are answers. The scientists who first began to piece together a scientific understanding of filoviruses—like Eugene Johnson, who tried to identify the animal reservoir of the Marburg virus—were working in an informational vacuum, and a dangerous one at that. A crucial question for the scientists facing Ebola is whether the virus can be transmitted through the air. Laboratory incidents like the accidental infection of Nancy Jaax’s control monkeys (97) and the movement of the virus through the Reston monkey house suggest that it can be, while Nurse Mayinga’s failure to infect anyone else despite spending two days in Kinshasa while symptomatic implies otherwise, as does CDC scientist Joe McCormick’s emerging unscathed from days of work inside an Ebola hut (228). Nonetheless, the lines of controversy are still visible, allowing The Hot Zone to illuminate some of the edges of what is known and knowable about this family of highly contagious viruses.
The Murky Ethics of Virus Research
To the extent that The Hot Zone has recurring characters and heroes, they are the virologists, doctors, veterinarians, and other scientists like Eugene Johnson and Nancy Jaax who push the frontiers of knowledge of filoviruses forward. Yet Preston does not depict a one-sided view of scientific glory here. Instead, he points to the often-murky ethics of virus research.
The fate of research monkeys is one place where the ethics of scientific activities are called into question. As she views dead or suffering monkeys whom she helped infect with Ebola, Nancy Jaax feels conflicted. Her veterinarian’s oath “bound her to the care of animals but also bound her to the saving of human lives through medicine,” two ideals that are at odds in this case (87). Eugene Johnson is similarly convinced of the importance of learning more about the Marburg virus, but nonetheless chooses to walk off into the forest while colleagues euthanize the sentinel monkeys at the end of the Kitum Cave expedition. He characterizes the monkeys as his “friends” and regrets their deaths (140). Both scientists proceed with their actions because they believe it likely that the research will pay off in human well-being in some measure greater than the suffering of the monkeys.
Preston’s discussion of the history and economics of the scientific monkey trade more broadly, however, calls this idea into question. What if the monkey trade also had to answer for some of the very emerging diseases that research monkeys are sacrificed to study? Preston probes this question when he correlates the likely location and decade of HIV’s first jump to the human species with the origin and growth of the monkey trade in the 1960s as evidence that the monkey trade may have been to blame for HIV’s species jumping. He writes, “It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade? Did AIDS come from an island in Lake Victoria? A hot island? Who knows” (59). Given that new viral archaeology now places HIV’s jump to humans as early as the 1920s and in Kinshasa, some thousand miles from Lake Victoria, this idea is no longer tenable (Gallagher, James. “Aids: Origin of pandemic ‘was 1920s Kinshasa.’” BBC News, 3 Oct. 2014). The conclusions Preston draws from the available evidence, however, indicate his deep skepticism of the monkey trade.
Much of this skepticism is borne out by events recounted in the book. The Hazleton Research Corporation lost millions of dollars after the CDC suspended its monkey import license for just a few months after its monkeys brought a second Reston outbreak to a Washington, DC, suburb in less than a year: “Monkeys are worth money,” Preston concludes (307). The Hot Zone raises questions about whether the knowledge gained through animal experimentation is worth the risk of exposing human populations to dangerous pathogens.
There are moments where The Hot Zone hints at even more troubling possibilities. Closing the chapter on Dr. Musoke, Preston comments that Musoke’s blood went to “laboratories around the world so that they could have samples of living Marburg for their collections,” and that the United States Army now keeps some of the Musoke strain alive, “immortal in a zoo of hot agents” (61). Preston’s tracking of the proliferation and preservation of the Musoke strain in laboratories around the world, including military ones, hints at Preston’s own later interest in bioweapons and bioterrorism. His 1998 novel, The Cobra Event, focuses on a bioterrorism event in which a deadly virus is released in New York City. His 2003 nonfiction work, The Demon in the Freezer, discusses the eradication of smallpox in the human population and its simultaneous survival in bio-weapons programs. It is a sobering reminder that not all virus research serves—or even tries to serve—greater human well-being.
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By Richard Preston
