117 Quotes by Richard Preston

The coast redwood tree is an evergreen conifer and a member of the cypress family. It’s scientific name is Sequoia sempervirens. No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree, and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.

The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.

Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.

He calls it speleogenesis by elephants – the creation of a cave by elephants.

The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.

A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus – deformed and unable to replicate very well.

The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human – the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.

It was as if his life’s work had slipped away unfinished before he had even been born. All he could find, at best, were a few remnants of a lost world.

Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses – how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth.