Panic in Level 4 by Richard Preston

Richard Preston is a best-selling author of books that rely on real life-situations and problems for their plots. In "Panic in Level Four", he returns to these real-life stories and tells the true tales that got him started writing books such as "Hot Zone".

The book is broken down into six main chapters that cover some of the strangest fringes of science, from killer viruses that appear periodically from different areas in Africa and the hottest, wettest, most inaccessible places on the planet. It talks about the language of viruses: Ebola, Hantaviruses and other pathogens that take human lives as easily as we snap our fingers, and of the scientists and doctors that spend their lives trying to find out what makes them tick and how to overcome them.

One chapter discusses Pi, the mathematical formula, and two brothers who built their own computer to calculate Pi to, literally, billions of digits, looking for any repetition in the long string of numbers that makes it up. While I personally have memorized Pi to 13 digits (3.14159265358...), it takes a special kind of person to go looking for Pi in that many numbers, much less to build a supercomputer in their own apartment that will not only let them find that many digits of Pi, but check those same digits for any repeating digits. And yet, this is a story of two Russian brothers who did exactly that, and why they did so.

Then there is a story about a tiny insect named the Fuzzy Algeid and how it is slowly killing off trees in the National Parks, and what the park service is doing to try and save trees that are in some cases hundreds and thousands of years old from this pest and others like it. But is it already too late? With the government cutting funding for the parks, it is likely that many of the trees are already doomed.

The Human Genome Project was started to sequence the human genome. But even though many wanted to see it done, there are already fights breaking out over the way the genome should be sequenced, and whether the results should be free to anyone or if specific genes should be copyrighted for use by biotech companies to make profits off of. And then there is Craig Venter, who has garnered much ire for his decisions about the way he wants to sequence the genome and what to do with the results.

The next story concerns the Unicorn Tapestries, and the discovery that was made when, for the first time in hundreds of years, the tapestries were taken down for cleaning and incredible discoveries were made when the backing was rolled away and the backs of the tapestries were revealed for the first time. One of the Chudnovsky brothers, who we first met in the chapter on Pi, is also involved here, crunching numbers to show how the tapestries would have looked when they were first made, before time and age diluted some of the colors.

Last, we find the saddest story yet, tales of people, mostly men, who have a single error in their DNA that makes them see their own hands as opponents, leading them to mutilate their own bodies in a feverish effort to kill their limbs before the limbs can do the same to them. And at fault is a chance in one letter in the strings of their DNA. Because the damage, such as it is, is genetic, there is no way to cure these men or to keep them from biting off their own fingers or otherwise mutilating their bodies.

This is a fascinating book, by turns sad and beautiful as well as awe-inspiring. These stories made me think and laugh and shake my head in dismay. This is the real fringe of science, stories that no newspaper or magazine seems to cover and which are rarely spoken about. It's a book that draws your attention to these stories and others. How many stories are out there now that we are ignorant about? Is there any way to tell? Perhaps this book will open your eyes to the wonder, mystery and tragedy all around us every day... if we could only see...