The first major bioterror event in the United States-the
anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists
who work with “hot” agents to find ways of protecting civilian
populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the
Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New
York Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of
Usamriid, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the
headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the
epicenter of national biodefense.

　　Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist
who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s most lethal emerging
viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top
secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to
develop a drug that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from
the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science,
the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two
high-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called
Vector. But the demo...