The Hot Zone (19 page)

Geisbert tried to look at many samples of virus as a way of sharpening his skills with an electron microscope. He was learning how to identify hot
agents by eye, by looking at photographs of the particles. When the samples of the Cardinal boy had arrived from Africa, Geisbert had spent days gazing at them. They attracted him. The Cardinal strain was a tangled mass of
6
s,
U
s,
g
s,
Y
s, snakes, and Cheerios mixed up with partly liquefied human flesh. Geisbert spent so much time staring at the virus, one of the true horrors of nature, that the shapes became implanted in his mind.

Tom Geisbert had heard about the sick monkeys in Virginia, and he wanted to take photographs of the meat to see if he could identify any simian-fever-virus particles in it. On Friday morning, November 17, the day after Dan Dalgard had killed all the animals in Room F, Geisbert decided to take a look at the flasks of monkey cells that were ripening. He wanted to examine them with a light microscope before he went on his Thanksgiving hunt, to see if he could observe any changes. A light microscope is a standard microscope that uses lenses to focus light.

At nine o’clock on that Friday morning, he put on a surgical scrub suit and a paper mask and went into the Level 3 lab where the flasks were being kept warm. There he met Joan Rhoderick, the technician who had started the Reston culture. She was staring through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope at a small flask. The flask contained cells that had been infected with the simian-fever virus that came from Monkey O53.

She turned to Geisbert. “There’s something flaky going on in this flask,” she said.

The flask was a typical virus flask. It was about the size of a person’s thumb and was made of clear plastic so that you could place it in a microscope and look into the flask. It had a black screw cap.

Geisbert stared through the eyepieces of the microscope. He saw a complicated world in the flask. As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at. The patterns of nature are deep and complex, constantly changing. He saw cells all over the place. They were tiny bags, each containing a nucleus, which was a darker blob near the center. The cells looked a little bit like fried eggs, sunny-side up. The egg yolk would be the cell’s nucleus.

Living cells ordinarily stick to the bottom of a flask to form a living carpet—cells prefer to cling to something when they grow. This carpet had been eaten by moths. The cells had died and drifted away, leaving holes in the carpet.

Geisbert checked all the flasks, and most of them looked the same way, like moth-eaten carpet. They looked real bad, they looked sick. Something was killing these cells. They were swollen and puffy, fat looking, as if they were pregnant. Tom could see that they contained granules or specks. The specks looked like pepper. As if someone had shaken pepper over fried eggs. He may have seen reflections of light in the pepper, as if light was gleaming through crystals. Crystals?
These cells were unrecognizably sick. And they were very sick, because the fluid was milky and clouded with dead cells, cells that had exploded.

They decided that their boss, Peter Jahrling, should have a look. Geisbert went to find Jahrling. He exited from Level 3—removed his scrub suit and took a water shower and dressed in civilian clothes—and went to Jahrling’s office. Then he and Jahrling returned to the Level 3 lab. It took a few minutes for both of them to change in the locker room and put on scrub suits. When they were ready to go in—dressed like surgeons—they entered and sat down at the eyepieces of the microscope. Geisbert said to him, “There’s something very strange going on in that flask, but I’m not sure what it is. This isn’t like
SHF.”

Jahrling looked. He saw that the flask had turned milky, as if it had gone rotten. “This is contaminated,” he said. “These cells are blown away. They’re crud.” The cells were exploded and dead. “They’re off the plastic,” he remarked. By
off the plastic
he meant that the dead cells had detached from the surface of the flask and had floated away in the broth. He thought that a wild strain of bacteria had invaded the cell culture. This is an annoying and common occurrence when you are trying to grow a virus, and it wipes out the flask. The wild bacteria consume the cell culture, eat it up, and make a variety of different smells in the air while they’re growing, whereas viruses kill cells without releasing an odor. Jahrling guessed that the flask had been wiped out by a common soil
bacterium called pseudomonas. It lives in dirt. It lives in everyone’s backyard and under fingernails. It is one of the most common forms of life on the planet, and it often gets into cell cultures and wrecks them.

Jahrling unscrewed the little black cap and waved his hand over the flask to bring the scent to his nose, and then he took a whiff. Hm. Funny. No smell.

He said to Tom Geisbert, “Have you ever smelled pseudomonas?”

“No,” Tom replied.

“It smells like Welch’s grape juice. Here—” He offered the flask to Tom.

Tom sniffed it. There was no smell.

Jahrling took back the flask and whiffed it again. His nose registered nothing. But the flask was milky, and the cells were blown away. He was puzzled. He handed the flask back to Tom and said, “Put it in the beam, and let’s look at it.” By
put it in the beam
, he meant “look at it using the electron microscope,” which is much more powerful than a light microscope, and can see deeper into the universe within.

Geisbert poured some of the milky fluid out of the flask into a test tube and then spun it in a centrifuge machine. A button of grayish ooze collected at the bottom of the test tube—a tiny pill of dead and dying cells. The pill was the size of a pinhead, and it had a pale brownish color. Geisbert thought
it looked like a dab of mashed potato. He lifted out the button with a wooden stick and soaked the button in plastic resin to preserve it. But now, what was on his mind was the hunting season. Later that afternoon—Friday—he went home to get packed. He had been planning to drive his Ford Bronco, but it had broken down; so one of his hunting buddies met him in a pickup truck and they loaded Geisbert’s duffel bag and gun case into it and set off on his hunting trip. When a filovirus begins to amplify itself in a human being, the incubation period is from three to eighteen days, while the number of virus particles climbs steadily in the bloodstream. Then comes the headache.

For Nancy and Jerry Jaax, it was the worst Thanksgiving of their lives. On Wednesday, November 22, they put their children in the family van and drove straight through the night to Kansas. Jaime was now twelve, and Jason was thirteen. The children were used to long drives to Kansas, and they slept peacefully. Jerry had almost lost his ability to sleep since the murder of his brother, and Nancy stayed awake with him, trading places behind the steering wheel. They arrived in Wichita on Thanksgiving Day and ate a meal of turkey with Nancy’s father, Curtis Dunn, who was living with Nancy’s brother.

Nancy’s father was dying of cancer. He had gone through life fearing that he might come down with cancer—he once took to his bed for eight months while claiming he had cancer when, in fact, he did not—and now he had come down with real cancer. He had lost a lot of weight that fall. He was like a human skeleton, down to less than a hundred pounds, but he was still a relatively
young man, and his hair was black and curly and oiled with Vitalis. He looked so terrible that the children were afraid of him. He did his best to show sympathy for Jerry. “How awful it was, what happened to you Jaaxes,” he said to Jerry. Jerry did not want to talk about it.

Nancy’s father sat and slept in a reclining chair most of the day. At night, he couldn’t sleep on account of the pain, and he would wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and get out of bed, and rummage around the house, looking for something. He smoked cigarettes continually, and complained that he couldn’t taste his food, that he had lost his appetite. Nancy felt sorry for him, but she felt a distance from him that she could not overcome. He was a man of strong opinions, and lately, from the way he had been talking while he wandered about the house at night, it seemed that he was going to try to sell the family farm in Kansas and use the money to get himself to Mexico for a cure involving peach pits. Nancy was angry with him for having such ideas, and that anger was mixed with pity for him in his illness.

After they had finished their turkey with Nancy’s father, they drove out to Andale, Kansas, a town northwest of Wichita, and ate another dinner, with Jerry’s mother, Ada, and the rest of the Jaax family in Ada’s house on the edge of town, near the grain elevator. Ada was a widow who lived alone in a ranch house that looked out across beautiful wheat fields. The fields were bare and planted with winter wheat, and Ada sat in her
chair in the living room and stared outdoors. She could not watch television because she was afraid she would see a gun. They sat around the living room and talked, telling stories about the old days on Ada’s farm, laughing and joking and trying to have a good time, and suddenly John’s name would come up. The conversation would flag into silence, and everyone would look at the floor, not knowing what to say, and someone would start crying, and then they would see tears running down Ada’s face. She had always been a strong woman, and none of her children had ever seen her cry. When she felt she could not stop it, she would get up and leave the room, and go into her bedroom and close the door.

They set up tables in the kitchen and served roast beef—the Jaaxes did not like turkey. After a while, people drifted into the living room with plates in their hands and watched a football game. The women, including Nancy, cleaned up around the kitchen and helped with the children. Afterward, Nancy and Jerry stayed on in Wichita for a few days to help Nancy’s father get to the hospital for his cancer treatments. Then they drove back to Maryland in the van with their children.

Dan Dalgard spent an uneasy Thanksgiving week. On Monday, he called Peter Jahrling at the Institute to find out if Jahrling had any further news about what had been killing the monkeys at Reston. Jahrling now had a tentative diagnosis. It
looked like the animals really did have
SHF
. Bad for monkeys, no problem for humans. He said to Dalgard that he felt strongly that it was simian fever, but he was reluctant to say so categorically. He wanted to play it carefully until the final tests were finished.

Dalgard hung up the phone believing that his decision to sacrifice the monkeys in Room F had been correct. Those monkeys had been infected with simian fever and would have died anyway. What now worried Dalgard was the possibility that the virus had somehow escaped from Room F. It might be quietly working its way through the building, in which case monkeys might start dying in other rooms. And then the virus would be very hard to control.

On Thanksgiving morning, Dan and his wife drove to Pittsburgh, to be with Dan’s wife’s parents. They drove back to Virginia on Friday, and Dan headed over to the monkey house to see if there had been any changes. He was shocked by what he found. Over Thanksgiving, five monkeys had died in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F. So the virus was moving, and what was worse, it was skipping rooms as it moved. How could it do that? Five dead monkeys in one room during the night.… He felt very uneasy.

Early on Monday morning of the week following Thanksgiving, Tom Geisbert went to work at the Institute wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and cowboy boots, as a kind of memento of his time in the woods. He was anxious to check up on the button of dead monkey cells that he had harvested from the little flask just before he had gone hunting. He wanted to look at the cells in his electron microscope to try to find some visual evidence that they were infected with simian fever.

The button was a dot the size of a toast crumb, embedded in a tiny plug of yellow plastic. He unlocked a filing cabinet and removed his diamond knife. A diamond knife is a metal object no larger than a small pocket-size pencil sharpener—about an inch long. It costs about four thousand dollars. It has a diamond edge—a large, flawless prism-shaped diamond, a gem-quality stone.

He carried the diamond knife and the plug of plastic containing the toast crumb of cells into the cutting room. He sat down at a table, facing the
cutting machine, and fitted his diamond knife into it, taking extreme care not to let his fingers touch the edge of the knife. One touch of a fingertip would destroy it. The diamond would also cut your fingertip, perhaps badly. The knife is extraordinarily sharp. It has the sharpest cutting edge of any tool on earth. It is sharp enough to split a virus cleanly in half, like a razor blade going through a peanut. If you consider the idea that a hundred million viruses could cover the dot on this
i
, then you get an idea of the sharpness of a diamond knife. If you happened to cut yourself with it, it would go through your skin without resistance, as if your skin were air—and it would split individual blood cells as it went through your finger. And then the knife edge would be covered with skin oil and blood cells, and would be ruined.

Tom looked into the eyepieces of a microscope that was attached to the cutting machine. Now he could see the toast crumb clearly. He threw a switch, and the machine hummed, and the sample began to move back and forth, the toast crumb sliding across the edge of the diamond knife. The cutting machine worked like a deli slicer, peeling off slices about this size:

The slices fell onto a droplet of water and rested on the droplet’s surface. Each contained as many as ten thousand cells, and the cells themselves were split by the knife. The blade peeled off slice after slice. They spread out like lily pads.

He took his eyes away from the microscope and looked around the table until he found a wooden stick that had a human eyelash glued to it with a dab of nail polish. It was a device for handling the slices. The eyelash had come from one of the women in the lab—it was generally believed that she had superior eyelashes for this kind of work, not too thick and not too thin, tapered, ending in fine points. He poked the eyelash into the water droplet and stirred it, separating the slices from one another. With the tip of the eyelash, he then lifted a few damaged slices out of the water and wiped them on a piece of tissue paper to get rid of them.