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Düsseldorf.
    Microscope
    JANUARY 16, 1970
    KARL HEINZ RICHTER was a smallpox expert in the Düsseldorf office of the state health department, a medical doctor with a kindly face and a flop of hair on one side. He wore stylish metal-framed eyeglasses and a gray sweater under a jacket, which gave him a comfy but up-to-date look. Dr. Richter, along with a team of doctors and technicians, analyzed the pus taken from Peter Los’s skin. They put a little dried flake of the pus in an electron microscope—a tubelike instrument, six feet tall—which could magnify an image up to twenty-five thousand times. Then they took turns looking into the viewing hood; they would have to vote on the diagnosis.
    Dr. Richter saw a vista of exploded human skin cells. Mixed in with the cellular debris were thousands of small, rounded bodies that looked like beer kegs. Some experts refer to them as bricks. The view in the microscope seemed vast, for magnified twenty-five thousand times, the flake of pus would have been an object nearly the size of a football field, and the little bricks in it lumps the size of raisins, and there could have been hundreds of thousands of them in the flake. These were virions of a poxvirus, and the vote was unanimous: this was smallpox.
    The pox bricks had a crinkly, knobby surface, rather like a hand grenade—some experts call this feature the mulberry of pox. (A mulberry is a small fruit, the size of a thumbnail, which looks like a blackberry.) There are many species and families of poxviruses; smallpox is an orthopox, a poxvirus of animals. Poxviruses are among the largest and most complicated viruses in nature. A pox particle itself either makes or consists of around two hundred different kinds of protein, and many of the proteins are locked together into the particle like a Chinese puzzle. Pox scientists are slowly picking apart the structure of the mulberry of pox, but so far nobody has figured out the full design. Experts in pox find the pox virion mathematical in its structure and almost breathtakingly beautiful. At the center of the mulberry there is an odd shape that looks like a dumbbell, which scientists call the dumbbell core or the dogbone of pox. Inside the dumbbell, or dogbone, there is a clump of DNA, which is the long, twisted, ladderlike molecule that contains the genome of smallpox—the complete blueprint and operating software for variola. The steps of the ladder of DNA are the letters of the genetic code. The genome of smallpox has about 187,000 letters, which is one of the longest genomes of any virus. Smallpox uses a lot of this code to defeat the immune system of its human host. It has about two hundred genes (which make the virus’s two hundred proteins). By contrast, the AIDS virus, HIV, has only ten genes. In terms of the natural design of a virus, HIV has a simple design that works well. HIV is a bicycle, while smallpox is a Cadillac loaded with tail fins and every option in the book.
    Poxviruses are one of the few kinds of viruses that are just large enough to be seen in the best optical microscopes (in which they look like fine grains of pepper). The infinitesimal palaces of biology extend far into the unseen. It is hard for the mind to grasp just how small is small in the microscopic universe of nature, but one way is to imagine a scale of nature built on the scale of the Woodstock music festival, which took place in a natural amphitheater at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York. It held up to a half-million people. Seen from low orbit above the earth, the crowd of people at Yasgur’s farm would have looked something like this:

    If a cell from the human body, in its natural size, were placed on this representation of the Woodstock festival, the cell would be an object about the size of a Volkswagen bus parked at the real festival. Bacterial cells are smaller than the cells of animals. If a single cell of
E.

coli
(the main type of bacteria that lives in the human gut) were placed