About book Panic In Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, And Other Journeys To The Edge Of Science (2008)
In introducing this collection of essays, Richard Preston reflects on the nature and constraints of writing narrative non-fiction. Basically, Preston is using Panic as an opportunity to add to or modify his pieces (many of which originally appeared as articles in The New Yorker) and give the reader a fuller sense of things that, for whatever reason, were left unsaid at the time. The first example of this (to which the title refers) being his potential exposure to a Level 4 hazardous disease, possibly a strain of Ebola, while doing his research for The Hot Zone (an anecdote he omitted in the book in order to maintain a “proper” distance from the subject of his writing).Mountains of Pi:Technology evolves at an exponential rate (at least according to Ray Kurzweil), so I finally had to stop part-way into this story to find its original date of publication (as it turns out, March 2, 1992). It’s not that reflections on research in computer science and mathematics from twenty years ago is irrelevant, I simply needed a point of reference.This is a profile of two brothers, David and Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky, who built a supercomputer in their apartment in pursuit of pi. They are certainly an interesting pair, Russian immigrants who are so close that they describe themselves as “a single mathematician who, by chance, occupy two human bodies.” I did not have an easy time “getting into” this story. Part of it, of course, is that I am not a theoretical mathematician. However, one of the things I love about an author like Douglas Hofstadter (though he and Preston do not necessarily address the same content) is his use of analogy to give his readers the opportunity to grab on to something to help them build a mental model for understanding the idea of a theory or subject they might not otherwise be able to comprehend. Preston jumps quickly to the notion of seeing God through pi, and to referring to numbers and equations as beautiful and transcendental, but without giving me the leg up I required to get a sense of what that might mean. For example: The Chudnovsky formula for pi is thought to be "extremely beautiful" by persons who have a good feel for numbers. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would find this to be a fascinating essay (probably people “who have a good feel for numbers”) and, indeed, I found the characters interesting enough, but I just never got the foothold I needed in order to enjoy it per se. All those other essays:It's a testament to just how much I did not enjoy this book that I'm having trouble mustering the energy to go through the next several essays piece by piece. A Death in the Forest (about invasive exotics, in this case, the wooly adelgid) and The Human Kabbalah (which discusses the human genome project) just felt like old news to me. The Search For Ebola was most interesting in its reflections on human fallibility (in this case, doctors' knee-jerk responses to help patients that, at times, put them in direct contact with the virus). With regard to The Lost Unicorn, as I whined about (perhaps excessively) in my review of Horns of Honor , my ninth-grade field trip to and focus on the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries have pretty much burnt me out on all things regarding said tapestries for the rest of my life. The Self Cannibals:Ok, so it would be hard to make this one uninteresting. I hate the title, as it all at once sensationalizes and actually diminishes the magnitude of its subject, Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome which (and I'm oversimplifying here) is a sex-linked genetic disorder that causes the individuals to be self destructive (in capacities both physical and mental). The patient in the photo below (which I believe is from around 1987), is outfitted with a special helmet and "limited motion elbow orthoses" to prevent him from engaging in any number of possible behaviors. The possibilities are, of course, limitless. At one point, one of the subjects interviewed by Preston asks him to get rid of his pencil because he worries that he'll stab it through his hand. Though the individuals involved in this essay were interesting and "timeless" in their own way, I was left feeling like I was only getting part of the scientific picture. Advances in deep brain stimulation and the like, while certainly nowhere near "solving" the mysteries of a syndrome as complex as Lesch-Nyhan, have revealed much about mental feedback loops relating to emotion and impulse control etc- enough that I found myself wanting to interrupt the written dialogue. I guess, then, it's my own lack of impulse control that left me feeling so annoyed by this last in Preston's collection of essays. However, overall, I just felt like this wasn't particularly good science writing.
Though I've enjoyed the two previous Richard Preston works that focused on frighteningly deadly viruses such as Ebola and Marburg, this one had a few strikes against it before I decided I could like this one two:1) The cover is horrible. People kept assuming I was reading some kind of Tom Clancy suspense thriller. I have nothing against Tom Clancy, but I don't read him. If I hadn't been a little more discerning when I was browsing through Barnes & Noble, I never would have looked at this book long enough to pick it up.2) The prologue is also strangely bad. Preston spends most of it either giving us another stomach-churning obligatory description of the effects on the human body of the Ebola virus (never, please, read Richard Preston while you're eating), or delivering an odd description of his 'method' of writing narrative non-fiction, as though people were dying to know just how does he do it? Having read David McCullough and Joseph Persico, I've seen enough great examples of narrative non-fiction that I wasn't particularly interested in Preston's personal approach on the genre. If anything, his description drew my attention to stupid little things in Preston's writing that I hadn't really noticed before. He seemed to think we'd be really impressed that he notices his subjects' hands. I wasn't that impressed, and I was suddenly jerked out of the world of the narrative everytime he referred to people's hands in the actual articals.Anyway, I really enjoyed this collection of articals, but the prologue and cover design were a little off-putting.So how were the articals? Very good. As already stated, I began chapter one in a bad mood of sorts, but as soon as Preston began delving into the world of the Chudnovsky brothers, I was back in good spirits. In this first artical (I call them articals, as big chunks of this volume originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine) Preston explores the world of the Chudnovsky brothers, two apparently brilliant mathematicians who build a supercomputer in their apartment for, among other things, seeing how many digits of the number 'pi' they can calculate. (After breaking the record for the most digits several times, they give up to pursue other things after they calculate it beyond 2 billion digits).This is my favorite section of the book, as it does a great job of being an interesting biography as well as being a very accessible look at the esoteric world of 'pi'.Other sections deal with foreign parasites decimating native forest populations, the heated race to map the human genome waged between the government and a private company, the complexity of photographing some tapestries from antiquity (a story that also surprisingly involves the Chudnovsky brothers and their super computer), a humanizing look at genetic disease that causes self-cannibalism, and of course a short revisit to Ebola.Some articals engaged me more than others, but as with any good collection of journalistic writing, the author keeps your attention with his ability to make you care about a variety of topics. "Panic in Level 4" is a quick read, and since he's giving you little chunks of story instead of writing an entire book about one subject (as he did brilliantly with "Red Zone" and "Demon in the Freezer"), this feels a tad slight.But when I finished the prologue, I was pretty sure this would end up in the pile of books going back to HalfPrice Books. As I flipped past the last page, I found I'd surprisingly enjoyed the rest of it. I think I'll keep it.
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I've read three other books by Richard Preston, and I liked them all well enough, though apparently not well enough to remember much about them. This book, though? Terrible, to a memorable extent. Part of it is that Richard Preston seems to find very boring people interesting. The Chudnovsky brothers, Craig Venter, etc. A good author can make boring people interesting, but apparently Richard Preston doesn't have that talent.Another problem is the science is just shoddy. I mean obviously so. Preston refers to non-Ebola hemorrhagic fevers as "types of Ebola", which they aren't. He also refers to people with cerebral palsy as "spastic". WTF, is this the 50s?
—Cara
Not quite what I expected when I picked up this non-fiction audiobook from the library, but it was still an interesting read. I guess by the title I was expecting hysteria, but it felt more like random stories threaded together loosely by a journalist. Subjects covered in the book include:1.tHow to take notes inside a Level 4 Containment Area when you can’t write on paper (No panic! The story of a malfunctioning zipper). Listening to this section of the audiobook reminded me of scenes from the movie OUTBREAK where Dustin Hoffman runs around in his special protective suit and feeds IV tubes filled with orange juice into patients’ veins. Okay, so it wasn’t really orange juice – it just looked like it to me. Find the monkey!!!!!! Love that movie and all its cheesy goodness.2.tInside a supercomputer built in a NYC apartment - convergence on transcendental π (mathematics as both an art and a madness – can we see God in π?). I was not anticipating nearly an hour of the audiobook be dedicated to the hunt for pi. Happily, I minored in Mathematics in college, so it wasn’t too painful for me in the end, even if it reminded me of how crazy academics can be in reality and brought back flashbacks of a computer science professor who slowly drove me insane with theories of computation *shiver*. The other thing I got out of reading this section of the book is how very un-intelligent I am in reality. Always good to read about the minds of others to bring yourself down several pegs! I can’t imagine building a supercomputer in my apartment with things I purchased from Home Depot. Then again, I wouldn’t know how to construct a supercomputer to begin with – hardware has never been my forte. 3.tTree-climbing to save the Hemlock tree (release the Japanese beetles!!!!!) The journalist was following a guy whose job it was to climb and measure trees. How do you stumble into that job? It seems like a kid’s dream – “Mom… When I grow up, I’m going to climb trees for a living”. Okay, so I’m sure he probably has a biology or botany degree and does things other than just climb trees. Still! Sounds like fun to the ex-camp-counselor in me :) I also had no idea you could buy cups of beetles for thousands of dollars. You learn something new everyday, I guess.4.tEbola inside an African Hospital in the 1970s (don’t immediately wipe the tears off your own face with the same handkerchief you use to wipe the face of an Ebola victim). I found the story of the hospital that had an X-ray machine, but didn’t have running water or bedpans to be interesting. The author mentioned that the patients’ families would bring in a clay pot for the patients’ waste. EEK!5.tPatenting DNA and mapping the human genome (clustering of micro-biologists near the NIH … don’t let thieves steal your gene code when you’re not looking) . Anyone who remembers the stock-market bubble at the turn of this century will likely interest from this story.6.tColors of the Medieval unicorn tapestries that haven’t seen sunlight in hundreds of years (bring out the mathematicians to help with digital imaging and discover that the tapestry is moving and alive). Number theory and colors. Billions of calculations to figure out colors for reproductions of art. Hmmmm. Completely unrelated thought -- whenever I play the boardgame Balderdash, I always feel a need to have a definition for one of the words as “a rare form of Medieval tapestry”, though usually slightly more intellectual sounding in its definition. It used to work at fooling people, but my family and friends have caught on, so no luck with that anymore. Oh well! I don’t play Balderdash very often, so I can’t help slipping it in everytime I play. 7.tPutting Poe’s “imp of the perverse” to sleep – studying genetic disorders/diseases (you found what in that diaper????). These poor children the author talked about in this section of the book. So sad. Can you imagine being a parent where you child seems like he is slowly chewing himself to death? :( :( :( I hope the researchers can find a cure! A grown man with the disorder had to ask the reporter with a mechanical pencil to step away from him because he was worried the disease would compel him to grab and stab himself in the eye with it. A compulsive urge to hurt yourself with your own hands and mouth… I can’t even imagine.
—FlibBityFLooB
I very much enjoyed 'The Hot Zone' and was eager to read this book of Preston's, especially after finding an autographed copy (at least according to the Barnes and Noble sticker on it) at a used book sale. While this was not exactly what I expected, and not quite as good as 'The Hot Zone', I did enjoy this book very much. Preston prefaces the book by noting that the stories are all expanded-upon essays he wrote for a New York newspaper, which I didn't appreciate until I got into later chapters where he rehashes details from earlier chapters, things that wouldn't be necessary if the book was an original work, but important in a stand-alone essay that readers unfamiliar with his other essays would need to know in order to understand contextual references.The title is slightly deceiving, as only the Ebola-related story actually involves a Level 4 lab. The 'Edge of Science' portion of the subtitle is more accurate, though 'Panic In Level 4' is certainly attention grabbing. All of the stories in this book were very interesting, from Preston's tour of an active Level 4 lab, during which he needed to take notes on autoclavable paper; to meeting people afflicted with a probable genetic disease that causes them to chew off their own lips and fingers while being fully aware of the pain etc. but unable to suppress the urges brought on by the disease; to the man privatizing the race to publish the human genome; to the 2 brothers who built a supercomputer in their New York apartment for the sole purpose of figuring out the digits of pi into the billions.That last story actually comes first in the book and is the one frequently mentioned and rehashed in the later chapters. It was also the one I liked least, and the longest, but the dislike was not strong enough to make me put the book down, it just bored me. Thankfully, Preston's introduction was interesting, I had enjoyed 'The Hot Zone', and he had me intrigued by the human cannibal story (which came last). I believe my dislike is that I can't grasp why anyone would want to know billions of digits of pi and can't figure out how to even create a calculation to do it. The best I could come up with was to take a circle with say a 10cm diameter and unroll it to create a line and start mentally placing the diameter along the line, chopping off 10 cm sections. When you reach a section less than 10cm, blow it up to 10x its size, move to the next decimal place and start chopping again. But how to tell a computer to do that, to the billions of places, I don't know, nor do I really care. Supposedly people think there is some mystery in pi, but if you have to go billions of numbers out to find it, what practical value does it really have?Otherwise though, the book was very engaging, and I do have another of his 'The Demon in the Freezer' to read at a future time, and I suspect that one is more about deadly microbes than pi (or restoring unicorn tapestries, the other story that wasn't exactly my cup of tea either).
—Kristin
