Read Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science for Free Online

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