Volume 50, Number 1 · January 16, 2003
Bugs Without Borders
By Helen Epstein
The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story
by Richard Preston
Random House, 240 pp., $24.95
Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus: People, Parasites, Politics
by Robert S. Desowitz
Norton, 262 pp., $24.95
The Reagan administration's decisions to build the Trident submarine and the MX missile and to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative were based on considerations of 'domestic politics, history and mythology' as much as they were on 'reality—or the best intelligence estimates about it,' writes Frances FitzGerald in Way Out There in the Blue, her account of Reagan's defense program.[1] Today, Washington is deeply preoccupied with biological and chemical weapons, and the Bush administration is preparing to spend heavily on biological defense research. America's leaders fear that the rogue states and terrorist groups that are now our adversaries would be more likely to use such weapons, because they are cheaper and easier to procure and deploy than nuclear warheads. In The Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston describes how US biodefense research can be seen as preparation for a new arms race, but he neglects to address the moral implications of this for the laboratories, the people who work in them, or for the American public in general. Nor is Preston as enlightening as Frances FitzGerald might be about whose interests this buildup actually serves.
Review, 4568 words
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