Richard Preston - Panic in Level 4

RICHARD PRESTON is the bestselling author of The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, The Demon in the Freezer, and The Wild Trees. A writer for The New Yorker since 1985, Preston won the American Institute of Physics Award and is the only non-doctor ever to have received the CDC’s Champion of Prevention Award. He also has an asteroid named after him. He lives near New York City with his wife and three children.

First Light

American Steel

The Hot Zone

The Cobra Event

The Demon in the Freezer

The Boat of Dreams: A Christmas Story

The Wild Trees

Copyright © 2008 by Richard Preston

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this book appeared in different form in The New Yorker.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jean-François Ruppol, M.D., for permission to reprint an excerpt from his unpublished narrative “Ebola 2,” translated into English from French by Richard Preston and William T. Close. Used by permission of Jean-François Ruppol, M.D.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Preston, Richard

Panic in level 4/Richard Preston.

p. cm.

“Portions of this book appeared in different form in The New Yorker. ”

eISBN: 978-1-58836-728-0

1. Medicine, Popular. 2. Science. 3. Science writers. I. Title.

RC81.P856 2008 616.02'4—dc22 2007041770

www.atrandom.com

v1.0

Hal Espen later became a senior editor at The New Yorker and later the editor of Outside magazine.

More precisely: a transcendental number cannot be expressed as the exact solution to any polynomial equation that has a finite number of terms with integer coefficients.