One way to identify a virus is to make it grow inside living cells in a flask of water. You drop a sample of the virus into the flask, and the virus spreads through the cells. If the virus likes the cells, it will multiply. One or two viruses can become a billion viruses in a few days—a China of viruses in a bottle the size of one’s thumb.
A civilian technician named Joan Rhoderick cultured the unknown agent from Monkey O53. She ground up a bit of the monkey’s spleen with a mortar and pestle. That made sort of bloody mush. She dropped the mush into flasks that contained living cells from the kidney of a monkey. She also took some of the throat mucus from Monkey O53 and put it into a flask, and she took some of the monkey’s blood serum and put it into another flask. Eventually she had a whole rack of flasks. She put them into a warmer—an incubator, held at body temperature—and hoped that something would grow. Growing up a virus in culture is a lot like making beer. You follow the recipe, and you keep the brew nice and warm until something happens.
Dan Dalgard did not visit the monkey house the next day, but he telephoned Bill Volt, the manager, to find out how things were going. Volt reported that all animals looked good. None of them had died during the night. The illness seemed to be fading away naturally. It looked like things were quieting down in Reston, and Dalgard felt relieved that his company has dodged a bullet.
But what were those Army people doing with the samples of monkey? He called Jahrling and learned that it was too soon to know anything. It takes several days to grow up a virus.
A day later, Bill Volt called Dalgard with bad news. Eight monkeys in Room F had stopped eating. Eight monkeys were getting ready to die. The thing had come back.
Dalgard hurried over to the monkey house, where he found that the situation had deteriorated suddenly. There were many more animals with squinting, glazed, oval-shaped eyes. Whatever the thing was, it was steadily working its way through Room F. By now, fully half the animals in the room had died. It was going to kill the entire room if nothing was done to stop it. Dalgard became extremely anxious for some news from Peter Jahrling.
Thursday, November 16, arrived, and with it came news that monkeys had begun to die in rooms down the hallway from Room F. Late in the morning, Dan Dalgard received a telephone call from Peter Jahrling. A pathologist at the Institute had inspected the meat very carefully and had given it a tentative diagnosis of simian hemorrhagic fever—harmless to humans, lethal to monkeys.
Dalgard now knew that he had to move fast to contain the outbreak before the virus spread through the monkey house. Simian hemorrhagic fever is highly contagious in monkeys. That afternoon, he drove up Leesburg Pike to the office park in Reston. At five o’clock on a gray, rainy evening on the edge of winter, as commuters streamed home from Washington, he and another Hazleton veterinarian injected all the monkeys in Room F with lethal doses of anesthetic. It was all over quickly. The monkeys died in minutes.
Dalgard opened up eight healthy-looking carcasses to see if he could find any signs of simian fever inside them. He was surprised to see that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. This greatly troubled him. Sacrificing the monkeys had been a difficult, disgusting, and disheartening task. He knew there was a disease in this room, and yet these monkeys were beautiful, healthy animals, and he had just killed them. The sickness had been entrenched in the building since early October, and it was now the middle of November. The Army had given him a tentative diagnosis, probably the best diagnosis he would ever get, and he had been left with the unpleasant task of trying to salvage the lives of the remaining animals. He went home that evening feeling that he had a very bad day. Later he would write in his diary:
There was a notable absence of any hemorrhagic component. In general, the animals were unusually well fleshed (butterballs), young (less than 5 years), and in prime condition.
Before he left the monkey house, he and the other veterinarian placed the dead monkeys in clear plastic bags and carried some of them across the hall to a chest freezer. A freezer can be as hot as hell. When a place is biologically hot, no sensors, no alarms, no instruments can tell the story. All instruments are silent and register nothing. The monkeys’ bodies were visible in the clear bags. They froze into contorted shapes, with their chest cavities spread wide and their intestines hanging out and dripping red icicles. Their hands were clenched into fists or open like claws, as if they were grasping at something, and their faces were expressionless masks, their eyes glazed with frost, staring at nothing.
EXPOSURE
November 17, Friday
Thomas Geisbert was an intern at the Institute, a kind of trainee. He was twenty-seven years old, a tall man with dark blue eyes and longish brown hair parted in the middle and hanging over his forehead. Geisbert was a skilled fisherman and a crack shot with a rifle, and he spent a lot of time in the woods. He wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, and tended to ignore authority. He was a local boy who had grown up near Fort Detrick. His father was the chief building engineer at the Institute, the man who repaired and operated the hot zones. When Tom Geisbert was a boy, his father had taken him to visit the Institute, and Tom had stared through the heavy glass windows at people in space suits, thinking it would be cool to do that. Now he was doing it, and it made him happy.
The Institute hired him to operate its electron microscope, which uses a beam of electrons to make images of small objects, such as viruses.
It is an essential tool to have around a virus lab because you can use it to make a photograph of a tiny piece of meat and find viruses in the meat.
For Geisbert, identifying hot strains and classifying the tribes of viruses was like sorting butterflies or collecting flowers. He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. He felt quiet and at peace with himself when he was padding around a hot zone carrying a rack of test tubes that held an unknown agent. He liked to go into the Level 4 suites alone, rather than with a buddy, especially in the middle of the night, but his tendency to spend large amounts of time at his work had begun to affect his personal life, and his marriage was breaking up. He and his wife had separated in September. His troubles at home only reinforced his tendency to bury himself in Level 4.
One of Geisbert’s greatest happiness in life, apart from his work, came from being in the outdoors, fishing for black bass and hunting for deer. He hunted for meat—he gave the venison to members of his family—and then, when he had got the meat he needed, he hunted for trophies. Every year around Thanksgiving, he went hunting in West Virginia, where he and some buddies rented a house for the opening of deer season. His friends did not know much about what he did for a living, and he made no effort to tell them about it.
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 spent days gazing at them. They attracted him. The Cardinal strain was a tangled mass of 6s, Us, gs, Ys, 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 cell 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 lens 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
