Panic in Level 4

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this book appeared in different form in The New Yorker.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jean-Francois Ruppol, M.D., for permission to reprint an excerpt from his unpublished narrative “Ebola 2,” translated into English from French by Richard Preston and William T. Close. Used by permission of Jean-Francois Ruppol, M.D.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Preston, Richard

Panic in level 4/Richard Preston.

p.   cm.

“Portions of this book appeared in different form in The New Yorker.”

eISBN: 978-1-58836-728-0

1. Medicine, Popular. 2. Science. 3. Science writers. I. Title.

RC81.P856 2008    616.02'4—dc22    2007041770

www.atrandom.com

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FOOTNOTES

1

Hal Espen later became a senior editor at The New Yorker and later the editor of Outside magazine.

2

More precisely: a transcendental number cannot be expressed as the exact solution to any polynomial equation that has a finite number of terms with integer coefficients.