Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science, Page 3

  This left me alone momentarily in the staging room inside a pressurized suit. I looked back at the door we had come in through. I could do it. I could just leave. Open my space suit and climb out of it, and go back to the locker room and put my clothes on. These people wouldn’t care; they’d probably be relieved to see me go.

  I unplugged my air hose. My space suit lost pressure and collapsed around me. Things got quiet: my air wasn’t running. I looked at the exit. Then I turned and opened the steel door and walked into the air lock. The door snapped shut behind me. At the far side of the air lock there was another steel door. I opened it and entered Level 4.

  I FOUND MYSELF STANDING in a narrow corridor with walls made of cinder blocks. Martha and Jeremy weren’t in sight. I needed air. I looked up and saw a rack of air hoses hanging from the ceiling. I reached up and plugged a hose into my suit. The roaring noise began again, and a rush of air filled my suit, the suit tightening with the pressure. I looked around.

  Several pairs of Christopher Robin–style rubber boots were lined up next to the air lock door. You were supposed to wear these boots in Level 4, to protect the bunny feet of the space suit from tearing as you walked around. I stepped into a pair of the boots, feeling nervous. The walls and floor were covered with thick-looking, beige paint—the paint was actually a layer of plastic resin that coated the inner surfaces of the hot zone, like the lining of a swimming pool, keeping it waterproof and airtight.

  Martha appeared, coming around a corner. She plugged herself into an air hose. Then she handed me a Bic ballpoint pen. It was a Level 4 hot pen, and it would never leave Level 4, except as a melted lump.

  Then we unplugged our air hoses and walked down the corridor. The rooms in Hot Suite AA-5 were small and cramped. They held typical laboratory equipment, the sort that you might find in any medical research lab in a university or corporation. I was struck by the ordinariness of Level 4. There were refrigerators, centrifuges, cabinets stocked with lab supplies. A couple of computers sat on counters. Nothing about the place suggested the presence of dangerous viruses, except for the unforgettable fact that we were inside space suits. There were sinks with water faucets. Wastewater from the sinks ran into collection tanks where the waste was sterilized. There was a room that had nothing in it except for two large chest freezers. They were hot freezers, hot as hell; I wondered if they contained Ebola, but I didn’t dare ask. The freezers were locked and were equipped with alarms. They could be opened only with combination keypads.

  I followed Jeremy and Martha around a corner into a small room, where we plugged in our air hoses. Shelves and counters ran around the walls. A sign said:

  BIOHAZARD

  HAZARD IDENTITY:

  The line had been left blank, since that day the researchers were working with an Unknown.

  On one counter sat an incubator—a metal box that was kept warm inside, at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, which is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of a human body. Martha opened the incubator and removed a rack full of small plastic flasks containing the Unknown. The flasks were sealed tightly with screw caps and contained a pinkish fluid. The fluid was a nutrient bath for a layer of living cells from the kidney of a monkey that were growing on a flat inner surface of each flask. Tiny drops of the blood of victim John Doe had been introduced into these flasks. If Doe’s blood contained a virus, the virus would be likely to infect the monkey cells. Then the cells would start dying—shriveling up and bursting—and this would be evidence that the flask contained a virus that had come originally from John Doe’s blood.

  As yet, there was no direct evidence that John Doe had been infected with a virus. He might have died from some other cause. (Other illnesses, such as malaria, can mimic some of the symptoms of Ebola or Marburg, but we had to assume that John Doe had already been tested by doctors who’d ruled out the more common infections and illnesses.) It was the job of the researchers to determine whether the blood contained a virus and, if so, to try to identify it. This was detective work. The procedure was that of Sherlock Holmes: you rule out possibilities until only one possibility remains.

  Martha wanted to look at the monkey cells to see if any of them showed signs of being infected with a virus. She sat down at a counter and placed one of the little flasks under a microscope. She did not open the flask. She stared into the eyepieces of the microscope through her faceplate, turning her head back and forth. “DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO GET YOUR HEAD COCKED SO YOU CAN SEE INTO A MICROSCOPE?” she yelled over the unending roar of air. She stood up. “DO YOU WANT TO LOOK?”

  I sat down on the chair before the microscope. I had difficulty seeing through my faceplate into the eyepieces. I began twisting my head around. Finally I got a clear look through the microscope into the flask.

  I could see glittering fields of monkey cells, reddish gold in color. Were they sick or healthy? They were just cells to me. As for the X virus, if any particles of it had been present in the cells they would not have been visible through the microscope. Virus particles are too small to be seen with an optical microscope. Most viruses can be seen only with an electron microscope, which magnifies things that are extremely small. A cold virus particle sitting at the base of an eyelash hair would be like a peanut sitting by the Washington Monument.

  As I was staring into the eyepieces of the microscope, I felt a popping sensation. Something felt weird around my chest. My suit began to feel sloppy and loose. But I was interested in the cells and wasn’t paying attention to my space suit. Eventually, though, I moved away from the microscope and stood up. That was when I realized that my space suit had blown open in the hot zone.

  AIR WAS RUSHING OUT around my neck and chest, pouring out of the suit. With a growing sense of alarm, I looked down to try to see what was happening, but couldn’t see anything. The lower part of my helmet hood blocked the view. I started feeling around with my gloves, but couldn’t get much sensation, for the gloves were thick and clumsy. I began tugging on something, some sort of fabric. To my horror, I realized that I was grabbing at my surgical scrubs. I was feeling around inside my space suit.

  I knew what had happened. As I had been bending over the microscope, the movement had twisted the zipper that ran across the suit’s chest, and the lips of the zipper had pulled apart, and the pressure in the suit had opened it completely. And now I couldn’t get the zipper closed. I almost threw a tubular cast.

  “DO I HAVE A PROBLEM HERE?” I yelled.

  Jeremy had been working with his back toward me. He swung around, looked at me, and swore. He moved toward me, holding his palms outward. He ran his palms back and forth on my chest, closing the zipper.

  My suit swelled up and tightened, regaining pressure.

  “HOW BAD WAS THAT?” I asked.

  He looked a little embarrassed. “THE ZIPPERS GET WORN. THEY CAN POP OPEN.”

  I had ended up with a ratty old piece of Army gear, a space suit that belonged to nobody. A little voice started speaking in my head. What are you doing here? the voice said. You’re in an Ebola lab in a fucking defective space suit. I started to feel giddy. It was an intoxicating rush of fear, a sensation that all I needed to do was relax and let the fear take hold, and I could drift away on waves of panic, screaming for help.

  Martha was looking into my eyes again.

  The little voice went on: You’re headed for the Slammer.

  Jeremy tried to soothe me. He assured me that the incident was not, in fact, an exposure to a hot agent. The suits did occasionally pop open, he admitted. “THE THING IS, YOUR SUIT HAD POSITIVE PRESSURE THE WHOLE TIME,” he explained. “THE AIR WAS FLOWING DOWN PAST YOUR FACE AND OUT OF THE OPENING. NOTHING COULD GET INTO YOUR SUIT. IT COULDN’T MOVE UP TO YOUR FACE.”

  I really wanted to believe that an Unknown virus was not having an encounter with me inside my space suit. The air had been gushing out, I told myself. The flow would have carried any particles of a hot agent out of my suit. Anyway, if something had gotten in, by now it w
as too late to panic. I told the scientists that I wanted to remain in Level 4. After that, I touched my chest zipper frequently to make sure it was closed. Habits can save your life.

  The researchers had work to do. Martha intended to open a flask of the Joe Doe Unknown. She carried one of the flasks to a Steriguard safety hood—a cabinet that produced a curtain of air blowing between the virus samples and the person sitting there. This air curtain acted as a shield, preventing any drifting particles from coming near the researcher. The cabinet also had a sliding glass door. If you opened the glass too far—potentially releasing a virus into the air of the hot zone—an alarm would go off.

  With a pair of tweezers, Martha picked up a glass slide that had spots of reactive compound on it. It was called a spot slide. You drop liquid samples of virus on the spots, and if a spot changes color, it helps you identify the virus. “WE HANDLE GLASS WITH TWEEZERS BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO PICK UP ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS WITH YOUR FINGERS,” she said. “YOU NEVER WANT TO CUT YOURSELF IN HERE.”

  Martha opened the flask containing the Unknown. She took up a push-button pipette—a device that is used in biological labs for moving very small quantities of fluid from one place to another.

  She inserted the tip of the pipette into the open flask and pushed a button, and the pipette sucked up a small amount of the liquid containing the Unknown X. She positioned the pipette over the glass slide and placed droplets of the liquid on the slide. Her hands moved with deft precision.

  “DO YOU WANT TO TRY DOING THIS?” she asked.

  I sat down in front of the safety cabinet. She handed me another flask. I had difficulty removing the cap from the flask. My heavy rubber space-suit gloves were impossible. I picked up the pipette and began dropping the liquid into a row of small test tubes, so that tests could be done on it. Even this simple task proved to be achingly slow and difficult. I couldn’t see how anyone could do medical research wearing Mickey Mouse gloves and a space suit. The fact that the Army researchers were able to do it every day made me appreciate the depth of their skill and training. My cheek began to itch, but I couldn’t figure out how to scratch it, since my head was inside a helmet hood. When I had finished the task, I closed the flask and held it up to the light.

  The liquid shimmered inside; I was face-to-face with a presumed Level 4 Unknown. My cheek was itching badly. “HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH AN ITCH IN ONE OF THESE SUITS?” I asked.

  “YOU DON’T,” Jeremy shouted above the unending roar of air.

  Eventually the two researchers wrapped up a certain phase of their work. Thus far, they still had no information about what had killed John Doe.

  Martha remarked that it was time to check on the monkeys.

  “THERE ARE MONKEYS IN HERE?” I asked nervously. The little voice started up again: Are they infected? Go now to the exit.

  Of course there were monkeys in here, Jeremy said. They had been vocalizing—screeching—the whole time, but the rushing sound of air in our space suits had drowned out their cries, he explained. He detached his air hose and began walking down a corrider, evidently heading for the monkeys.

  “DO THEY HAVE BLOODY NOSES?” I asked.

  The monkeys were fine, Jeremy said. He led me through a door into the largest room in Hot Suite AA-5. It was lit with flourescent lights. Along two walls of the room, stainless steel wire cages were stacked from floor to ceiling. Most of the cages were empty, but several of them held monkeys.

  “THESE MONKEYS ARE SURVIVORS,” Jeremy said.

  The monkeys were excited to see us. They raced back and forth in their cages, their eyes fixed on us. They were rhesus monkeys. Two of them sported wicked-looking canine fangs. (“Organ-grinder monkeys they aren’t,” one Army scientist had remarked.) The largest one, a male, bared his canines at me, staring at me with wide, fierce-looking eyes.

  Martha came in. “THEY’RE MAKING THREAT DISPLAYS AT YOU,” she said. “THEY DON’T RECOGNIZE YOU.”

  The monkeys could recognize human faces, even inside a space suit. The monkeys knew Martha and Jeremy, and seemed to look forward to their visits, for the humans fed the monkeys treats. The monkeys also seemed to find humans entertaining.

  As a part of the Institute’s work in developing drugs and vaccines to protect humans against diseases, researchers exposed monkeys to viruses and then tested various treatments on them. Many monkeys died during such tests, but there were always survivors. “THIS MONKEY IS A SURVIVOR OF A COMBINATION OF SIMIAN HEMORRHAGIC FEVER AND EBOLA VIRUS,” Jeremy told me, pointing to one. “AND THIS ONE SURVIVED MARBURG VIRUS,” he said, pointing to another.

  Marburg is the type of Ebola associated with Kitum Cave. The monkey that had survived a Marburg infection was about six years old, and his name was Eighty-seven. His odds of survival had been slim, but now he was healthy and very likely immune to Marburg. He was smart and easily bored. He yawned at us, exposing cruel-looking fangs.

  Jeremy shuffled over to a shelf and got a box of Froot Loops cereal. Eighty-seven became excited.

  Jeremy handed me the box and suggested that I give some of the cereal to Eighty-seven, to help make friends with him. I pulled a couple of Froot Loops out of the box. Keeping my eyes averted respectfully, for Eighty-seven was a dominant male and would become angry if I looked at him (in monkey language, staring is the equivalent of giving the finger), I placed the Froot Loops on my palm and held out my hand. The monkey’s arm shot out of the cage, and he plucked the cereal from my palm and crammed it into his mouth, and then held out his hand for more. He might have been able to tear my space suit if he had wanted to, but once I had offered him Froot Loops he became friendly. I offered him more Froot Loops. He kept shoving his hand out for more. A Froot Loop fell to the floor, and Eighty-seven followed it with his eyes, looking wistful, I thought. He put out his hand for more.

  The Army people had become fond of the monkeys. Their feeling was that any monkey that had survived Ebola should be allowed to live out the rest of its days in peace. In addition, the survivors’ blood contained immune antibodies to the viruses, which could be used in experiments. But the monkeys could not leave the hot zone, because there was a worry that they might still be silent carriers of the viruses that had once infected them. “BASICALLY, NOBODY KNOWS MUCH ABOUT EBOLA OR MARBURG, SO WE DON’T KNOW IF THE MONKEYS COULD INFECT ANYONE WITH THESE VIRUSES EVEN AFTER THEY’VE RECOVERED FROM THE DISEASE,” Jeremy said.

  We said good-bye to the monkeys and returned to the laboratory rooms. Finally it was time to make an exit from the hot zone. I followed the researchers through the maze of corridors and little rooms to the air lock.

  Jeremy entered the air lock first and started the chemical shower by pulling on a chain. The shower began running in the air lock, sterilizing the outside of his space suit. While Martha and I waited for Jeremy to finish his chemical shower, I handed her my Level 4 Bic pen. She left it near a computer for the next person to use. Then Martha and I went into the air lock together. She pulled the chain and we stood under the chemical shower. The chemicals gave off a strong but not unpleasant smell, which eventually crept inside my space suit.

  Martha pointed to my Teflon paper—my notes—which I held clutched in my glove. “LET ME HAVE THAT FOR A SEC,” she said. She crumpled it up, dipped it into a bath of chemicals, and then, using both hands, she scrubbed the Teflon paper against itself and squeezed it, as if she were rinsing a washrag. After a minute or so, she pulled the paper out of the chemical bath. My notes were wrinkled, wet, and sterile. The shower stopped, and I opened the steel door and stepped into the normal world, holding the notes.

  Later, I wrote about Nancy Jaax’s feelings after she had gotten a hole in her space suit and she was standing in the chemical shower, feeling Ebola blood oozing around inside her suit and wondering who was going to pay the babysitter. I constructed the passage primarily from detailed interviews with Nancy Jaax, of course. Yet there is something else in that scene that did not appear in the book. It was an iceberg of personal experi
ence, one I hadn’t felt able to write about until now. I had been in the rooms she had been in. There, I had experienced a breach condition in my space suit, too, and it had happened in the presence of a putative hot Marburg-like Unknown. And I had stood in the same chemical shower afterward, with thoughts and fears pouring through my mind…. I had been boiled in the soup.

  I LOVE EXPLORING UNSEEN WORLDS. In this book, we are embarking on a deep probe through the realms of the vanishingly small, where, at times, all we can say is “There be monsters.” The chapters in this book were originally published in The New Yorker, but I’ve expanded, updated, and linked them.

  One monster of the microscopic universe is a mysterious genetic disease, called Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, which is caused by the alteration of a single letter of a person’s DNA code. If one letter of the human DNA is altered in a certain place in the code, the person who is born with the tiny error has a dramatic change of behavior—a lifelong, irresistable compulsion to attack himself, chewing off…it’s in the last chapter.

  “The Mountains of Pi” describes David and Gregory Chudnovsky, mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of mail-order parts in Gregory’s apartment in New York City. They were using their homemade supercomputer to calculate the number pi () to billions of decimals. They were looking deep into pi, down into an infinitesimal smallness of precision, deeper and deeper into pi, trying to get a glimpse of the face of God.

  I originally wrote about the Chudnovskys in a “Profile” for The New Yorker. When I first met them and began researching the piece, they seemed pleased that I was writing about pi, but they soon got the idea that I was also writing about them. They began to object. “My dear fellow, can’t you leave our names out of this?” David said.

  I had to explain that it is not really feasible to leave a person’s name out of a New Yorker “Profile” of him.