![]() ![]() He has seen the crowded markets full of palm civets, pangolins, and raccoon dogs, with “multiple animals packed into small cages, stacked atop one another, sharing their fears and their bodily fluids, while hundreds of people worked and lived and ate amid the jumble, toddlers ran back and forth amid offal from butchered animals, families slept in cramped lofts above their shops.” He has traveled with disease cowboys, as they’re sometimes called, into caves and around remote villages, looking for viral hosts. His beat, after all, has always been the wild. One of the best things about Breathless is Quammen’s familiarity with the remote areas where viruses tend to emerge. He demonizes no animal, not even the horseshoe bat from which SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged, nor the critically endangered pangolin, a group of whom died in a Chinese wildlife rescue center of an unknown respiratory disease, “inactive and sobbing.” At one point, after I’d zoned out reading a calculation for herd immunity (“threshold = 1 – 1/R0,”), he began the next paragraph with the words: “ He prints equation. But just when your eyes glaze over, he is there to gently shake you awake. Quammen writes clearly, accurately, and even conversationally about the science, from the nomenclature conventions of virus variants to a virus’s “receptor binding domains.” One of the COVID-19 virus’s most nefarious adaptations is something called a furin cleavage site, which signals the infamous spike protein to change shape, as Quammen puts it, “like a Transformer robot metamorphosing suddenly into a truck.”Īs Quammen warns us at times, the scientific going can get tough-some of the explanations are very technical. “The medical crisis of COVID-19, the heroism of health care workers and other people performing essential services, the unjustly distributed human suffering, and the egregious political malfeasance that made it all worse-those are topics for other books.” (For those stories, try The Premonition, by Michael Lewis, or The Plague Year, by Lawrence Wright.) “This is a book about the science of SARS-CoV-2,” he writes. Quammen would probably disagree with describing Breathless as a thriller. David Quammen, author of ‘Breathless’ (Photo: Simon & Schuster Ronan Donovan) In Breathless, Quammen writes that virologists “had for decades seen such an event coming, like a small, dark dot on the horizon of western Nebraska, rumbling toward us at indeterminable speed and with indeterminable force, like a runaway chicken truck or an eighteen-wheeler loaded with rolled steel.” (The main lesson I took from Spillover: never, ever go anywhere near a bat cave.) That’s what caused AIDs, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, Nipah, West Nile, and others serious maladies that Quammen chronicled in in the book. As Quammen wrote in 2012 in his similarly terrifying book Spillover, infectious disease scientists have been warning for years about the very real possibility of a pandemic caused by a virus “spilling over” from the nonhuman world. ![]() The emergence of a “novel” virus was, of course, a surprise to none of them. With more than four decades of reporting on the natural world under his belt-starting as Outside’s Natural Acts columnist in 1981-Quammen was perfectly placed to listen in on the conversation as scientists and virologists began rapid-fire pinging each other in December 2019-at first with rumors of an unidentified pathogen, and then with snippets of genetic code-trying to get a bead on something that, said one, looked “very, very similar to a SARS coronavirus.” The book is already a finalist for the National Book Award, and for longtime Outside readers, it’s something of a dream come true (even though it’s about a nightmare). Nearly three years later, we have a compelling new nonfiction scientific thriller about SARS-CoV-2: Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virusby science writer David Quammen. That plot, of course, was also playing out in real life at that very moment. In March 2020, I was busy devouring The End of October, a novel by Lawrence Wright about a deadly new virus that shuts down the globe as epidemiologists engage in a frantic race to isolate the pathogen. Editor’s note: Outside will be hosting a live Q&A with David Quammen on Thursday, October 13, at 6 P.M. ![]()
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