Blog 1 on The Hot Zone

For my outside reading for quarter four, I will be reading The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.  This is a nonfiction novel about the ebola viruses and its appearances in the history of the human race.  The novel as a whole is 411 pages long, but I only read pages 1-111 for this post.  So far, the novel has explored the origins of the filoviruses.  Filoviruses are a rare type of viruses that look like strings, instead of like spheres.  These viruses were discovered in the tropics and contain many diseases including strains of ebola and marburg disease.  The only reason a large epidemic has not occurred is that the outbreaks kill themselves out.  The real danger for humanity is if the filoviruses somehow turn airborne on a large scale.  This novel is one of the best pieces of writing that I have ever read.  It is the kind of book in which you don't want to stop reading.  The Hot Zone is also the most horrifying thing I have ever read.  It somehow brings reality to the utmost suffering and weakness to humanity.  That is one of the reasons that makes this book so great.  It is unnaturally, and yet realistically gruesome.  Humans naturally want to know more than they should be exposed to.  This book seems to bring up topics that are not for the weak minded.  I currently believe that I want to pursue a field in medicine for my career, which only seems to make the book more interesting.  Before I began reading this book, I did not have an appreciation for the power of nature.  Now I respect nature, but I also have a desire to work with it and to uncover its secrets.  For instance, all of the proteins in the ebola virus are not even known to man.