Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today our guest is the New York Times bestselling author, Richard Preston, Class of '76. Mark Wood: Welcome Richard. It's good to have you with us, kind of with us. As much with us as it's possible to be these days. Richard Preston: It's great to be with you guys. It's good to be in Pomona College, virtually. Mark Wood: Yeah, I should start this off by saying this is being recorded on April 22nd at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. This must be a particularly strange time for you, Richard, because you've been ringing the alarm bell about some emerging viruses and the possibility of pandemics for a long time ever since The Hot Zone. Unfortunately very few people who are currently in power seem to have been listening, at least in this country. Some people are saying this is the healthcare equivalent of a 500 year flood. Is that true? Richard Preston: Actually not true at all. We've often heard it said that this is a 100 year event. But it's not at all. In fact, it's part of a pattern of these emerging viruses, viruses that are leaking out of the Earth's ecosystems and invading the human species. And it's been happening more and more frequently and these outbreaks have been ballooning much more rapidly. We have to step back and take a look at the big picture of nature itself and the relationship of the human species to nature. Richard Preston: So for a long time now, the world has faced these epidemics and pandemics that seem to come out of nowhere. And just to give you some examples, the AIDS virus, HIV, which is thought now to have made a jump from a wild animal, perhaps a chimpanzee, into one person, somewhere around the year 1910, on a tributary of the Congo river in Central Africa. And the virus, once it made that transition from its animal host into a human, it evolved rapidly and then began to spread inexorably until HIV has gone around the world. Richard Preston: Now, with Corona virus, this is the third trans-species jump of a Corona virus into the human species in recent years. The two previous ones were the SARS virus and the MERS virus. And now the one that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2. Richard Preston: So this is what's happening. And I think maybe the question is why is it happening? It's something that I think about. It's something that scientists are really putting their minds to. And there's a lot of debate about it, but maybe I can just throw in my two bits or try to get some clarity on it. The viruses are everywhere in nature. Everything that lives that's made of cells and gets infected with its own viruses. Everything from bacteria to blue whales. The world of the viruses is distinct from the world of truly living organisms that are made of cells. The world of the viruses could be termed the virusphere. You hear this term. And it's distinct from the biosphere. The virusphere and the biosphere interpenetrate each other like milk in tea or like mist in air. They are essential to each other. Richard Preston: But the virusphere, the universe of viruses, may be much older than the biosphere. Viruses may be, we don't know, representatives of the earliest forms of life on the planet. Richard Preston: A virus is a very tiny capsule made of proteins and it has some genetic code at the center of it. It has the capacity to make copies of itself, but it must make copies of itself inside the cell of a living organism host. So viruses are parasites. Now, one of the viruses best strategies, so to speak, for longterm survival, is to change host species. They do this frequently. For example with humans, we're biologically fairly similar to lots of other mammals. And so a virus that colonizes some kind of mammal, can fairly easily leak into a human being, a body somewhere. Richard Preston: Now the current Coronavirus looks like it probably came from a bat that lives in caves in China. Recently, an American team working with Chinese colleagues, did a survey of the bats of China that live in caves and they found about 500 distinct Corona viruses. They're all basically viruses that give a bat a cold, they're not very bad for bats. But every now and then these viruses can make that transition and find their way into a human body, which is apparently what happened in Wuhan, China in about probably mid November of last year. Richard Preston: And scientists studying the genetic code of the Corona virus, have concluded that this pandemic began with exactly one human being. One person catches a bat sniffle and months later, the entire global economy has a heart attack and it's not the last time this is going to happen, nor is it the first time. Mark Wood: So I guess the next question is, what lessons should we be learning from this? And most importantly when this is over, what should we be doing to prepare for the next one? If you were the world's emerging virus czar, what would you do? Richard Preston: Well, first of all, I try to look carefully at what lessons can we learn from this. And I happen to be something of an optimist about ourselves, about the human species, and about our future on the planet. We have a lot of problems and we've created a lot of problems, but we also have an uncanny ability to shift our behavior. And humans are nothing if not adaptable. Richard Preston: So with every crisis, there also comes an opportunity and right in the depths of this pandemic, I think we can productively ask the question, how can we turn this dreadful situation to our advantage? What can we do to make life better for all of us? And there are actually some pretty simple answers to this. First of all, it ought to be completely obvious to everybody by now that public health is a matter of national security of the highest order. Richard Preston: And so whatever we invest now in public health as a society in our government and private industry, is money very well spent and we will get a huge return on investments like this. When one person catches a bat sniffle and it costs the planet at least $17 trillion in lost economic activity, almost anything that you spend on public health is going to be worth it. Richard Preston: The first thing and a very simple thing we can do, is just invest more in disease surveillance and find ways to encourage governments to be honest about what happens when a new virus is coming out. Everybody's life is at stake basically. So for example, my most recent book, Crisis In The Red Zone, is about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa that happened in 2014. And I focus on a small, completely forgotten hospital in West Africa which was devastated by Ebola. Many of the medical staff died in the line of duty. It's a terrible but also impressive story of heroism. A handful of Americans understood that the crisis in this small forgotten African hospital was actually a crisis for everybody in North America because we're all connected as a species and a virus that is emerging one place can get anywhere very fast. Richard Preston: So surveillance is going to be critical. And then the next thing that I think we can do, and this is very feasible, is to invest in general platforms for the rapid development of vaccines and new kinds of antiviral drugs that can act very effectively on a new emerging virus. And you can start research on these viruses even before an individual virus comes out. Richard Preston: So for about 25, 30 years, there has been research on a vaccine for Corona viruses. A handful of far seeing scientists recognized Corona viruses as one of the more profound threats to public health and for 30 years now, there has been a certain amount of development work on vaccines for them. And this development work is now paying off hugely. So that's what we can do. Richard Preston: And then finally, it's a matter of public education and of strengthening healthcare systems around the world and in the United States. We need to make sure that everybody gets proper access to decent healthcare and that public health is strengthened around the world. Even in places where public health is practically nonexistent, where good treatment is really hard to come by. There are kind of simple things you can do. Richard Preston: So at the moment, I'm investing in this little hospital in Africa, this kind of a government hospital in Sierra Leone and I'm providing funds for the training of nurses and these are public health nurses, and I figure that even an individual can help out. And if you train one or two nurses, whatever you can afford, then those people will go on for an entire career benefiting people in public health. So these are the kinds of things we can do. And in the end it boils down to recognizing that we're all getting boiled in the pot together. Patty Vest: Richard, we'll come back to this a little later, but we want to take you back to the '70s. Both you and your brother Doug, who by the way is also a bestselling author, came to Pomona College from the East Coast. What brought you to Pomona? And what was your experience like? Richard Preston: Oh, no, you would have to ask this question. I did not have a distinguished high school record. I grew up in the lovely Republican town of Wellesley, Massachusetts. And where Doug and I and our other youngest brother David, well, let's just say we were on a first name basis with some of the town police officers. My parents wanted to send me to a private school, I insisted in staying in a public high school because that's where my friends were. Very few of my friends went on to college. I was very happy in that peer group and we were a countercultural clique, I guess. We were weird. Richard Preston: And anyway, I had disciplinary problems on my record, which included, I'm very sorry to say this, an assault on a teacher and I didn't hurt the guy, it was a protest and I tried to push past him and in doing so, I grabbed his arm. Now, under law, you're interfering with somebody's right of movement and there's no two ways around that. So I got into massive trouble for that. I think I was nearly expelled. I was suspended for two weeks and then I had to serve, I think 30 afterschool detention [inaudible 00:13:44]. And then when I got around to applying to colleges, I completely got hosed. I got rejected from every school I applied to. Richard Preston: And so then I declared to my parents that I was just going to get a job, I was going to work and I didn't need to go to college. I had an aunt on the West Coast who was a professor at Berkeley, and she was freaking out about this. And so anyway, at her expense, she flew me out to California and she took me to see Stanford and Berkeley and then [inaudible 00:14:15]. And of all the schools I saw, I liked Pomona the best. I really liked Pomona a lot. And by that time, I was getting awfully tired of working at my job in Boston. Richard Preston: College acceptances go out in April and it was now late June and I'm like, "Gee, I'd really like to go to college. I'd really like to go to Pomona College." So I just sent an application in late, ultra late. And of course I got a little tiny letter very fast back saying it's too late. Richard Preston: And then I did something, now I hate to say this. The Dean of Admission at the time was Jack Quinlan, a wonderful human being. He was a fantastic guy. Anyway, that was back in the days when you could make a collect telephone call and collect calls we're expensive. They ran about 20 bucks from Boston. And nowadays in the age of cell phones, people don't even know about this, but you get an operator on the phone and then the operator would call up the person you're calling. Patty Vest: "Will you accept?" Richard Preston: "Will you accept a collect call from Mr Dick Preston in Massachusetts?" And Dean Quinlan goes, "Yes, I'll accept it." So I got him on the phone. I said, "Dean Quinlan. I'm really sorry to bother you, but I know you guys have already rejected me and I know it's kind of late, but I just had a question for you. You guys ever change your minds?" Richard Preston: And Dean Quinlan was very nice about it and he said, "No, no, we don't do that. Our policy is our policy." And then I go, "Well, I've got one more question for you. Okay. So, I'm really sorry to keep bothering you, but is there any chance that your policy could change in the near to intermediate future?" And he goes, "No, there's no chance that our policy will change." And I'm like, "Okay, well thank you and I really appreciate your time. Richard Preston: And then I let a week go by and then I thought, "Oh, I'm going to call him again." So I reversed the charges on him again and now he's in 40 bucks because he accepted. "Dick Preston is calling from Massachusetts, will you accept the charges?" And he's like, "Okay." And so, "Dean Quinlan, look, I'm really sorry, this is Dick Preston from Massachusetts. I'm really sorry to bother you about this, but I was just checking in with you to find out if your policy maybe has changed or maybe there's any chance that it might change." And he goes, "No, no, the policy hasn't changed. Thank you for your interest in Pomona College." Richard Preston: And then I did it again after a few days go by. Now he's in 60 bucks, $20 dollars [inaudible 00:17:37]. And I can just imagine, this is a little off color, but I can imagine him maybe remarking in the office, "Oh no, it's that Dick from Massachusetts again." Patty Vest: "He's calling again." Richard Preston: And finally, I called him four or five times, I don't know. But I just didn't give up. I felt at this point there was nothing to lose. And finally he goes, "Well, now Dick, you're really very interested in Pomona College and we do value commitment." And I was able, I think, to articulate to him why I wanted to go to Pomona College. Why I wasn't interested in Stanford, I wasn't interested in Berkeley. It's because it was faculty contact. It was a smaller place where you could really get to know the faculty and you could study hard. And I told him, "I'm really sick of my job. I really want to go to college and I really want to study, I'm really into that." So finally he goes, "Okay, well now Dick. I just want to tell you, the policy is not changing, however, you're on the waiting list." And then surely afterward they informed me that I could join in February. That's how I started. Patty Vest: What a story. Mark Wood: So the moral is, persistence does sometimes pay off. Richard Preston: Well, yeah. But there's a little bit of a downside, which is, at some point I was invited to give a commencement address at Pomona and I ran into Dean Jack Quinlan. Who by then, I guess he'd moved to the development office at Princeton where he was one of the architects of the famous and incredibly effective Pomona Plan. And I told that story, a shorter version of it in my commencement address. And Dean Quinlan says to me, "Richard, I'm going to kill you. Do you know how many calls I'm going to get now from people who got rejected from Pomona?" Mark Wood: I was just thinking that the current Dean may really think you too. Patty Vest: Policy hasn't changed. Mark Wood: Policy hasn't changed. Richard Preston: Policy has not changed. Mark Wood: Everybody out there, listeners, no. Policy hasn't changed. Patty Vest: Oh my goodness, too funny. Mark Wood: So, did you know, Richard, that you wanted to write when you first came to Pomona? Or did that happen somewhere along the way? Or afterward? Richard Preston: Well, it sort of happened partly at Pomona College. I originally intended to be a visual [inaudible 00:20:31] and I took our courses and loved them at Pomona. I also got deeply into art history. I took some art history courses, did well in them and loved it. I should say that, Doug and I come from a family of art historians and our late mother was a painter and an art historian. She was a gifted artist. So, it was kind of in our blood. Richard Preston: But somewhere along the line I started thinking about using words as another way of conveying images and doing something creative. And I fell in with Darcy O'Brien, an author who was then a Professor of English at Pomona. Darcy later had a really distinguished career in writing. He's no longer alive. But his first novel, A Way Of Life, Like Any Other, which is a thinly veiled memoir of his growing up in Hollywood as the son of two incredibly famous film stars. That won the Hemingway Award for best first novel. And Darcy was reading parts of it out loud to us, his students in his creative writing courses. Richard Preston: So Darcy really introduced me to the idea of excellent writing. There were others as well, there was the late Professor Martha Andresen, and Professor Ed Copeland. So the English department at Pomona really formed me, really shaped me. And I credit the English department for moving me in the direction of creative writing. Richard Preston: And then when I graduated as this English major, Darcy persuaded me to go to graduate school to do a PhD in English. And his theory was, "Well, you can do two years at a place like Princeton." Which is where I ended up, "And then you can get out before you have to write the PhD. Just do two years and then go off and write." Richard Preston: When I ended up at Princeton, I had always conceived of myself as, if I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to be a novelist. You write fiction. That's considered, I think even to this day, it's considered the highest literary form other than poetry, in terms of cultural ascendancy. However, at Princeton I ended up taking an undergraduate course in writing from John McPhee, the author. And McPhee is an incredibly gifted writer of nonfiction, who also happens to be a very gifted teacher. Richard Preston: And I think McPhee, who keeps statistics on everything, tells me that, about 55 to 60% of the graduates of his course go on to become either professional writers or professional editors in publishing. And so in that course, I learned a lot about the techniques of nonfiction writing and it became perfectly obvious to me that the nonfiction writer can approach and enter into worlds that are as persuasive and deep and as exploratory of the human condition as any fiction. Richard Preston: There are certain limitations in nonfiction writing, but then there are limitations in fiction too. And one of the great limitations in fiction is that it's this idea of the contract between the reader and the writer. And it's an unspoken contract known as the willing suspension of disbelief. Richard Preston: So when you're reading fiction, let's say you're reading, Lord Of The Rings. So the time when you're immersed in the book, you have a willing suspension of disbelief and you believe in middle earth, you believe in these characters. But then when you finish the book and it's all over, you have to return to the world of reality. Whereas in nonfiction writing, the [inaudible 00:25:03] writer is like, vis a vis the reader, the deal is, "Okay, I as the writer I'm going to give you as closely as I can make it, the actuality and the truth of the story and all the characters you're reading about are real." And when I'm presenting you with their thoughts or their inner emotions, this is based on reporting and it's repeatable. It's scientific in the sense that if you interviewed this person again, you would get much the same description of what their experiences were. Richard Preston: And so the reader doesn't have to suspend disbelief, the reader can actually believe in these events and that can touch the human heart. It can touch your emotions and it can touch your mind in a way that fiction can not. So for example, In The Hot Zone, which is the book about an eruption of Ebola virus near Washington, DC. We have events that really occurred and when you're reading it, there are some really scary scenes in The Hot Zone. When you're reading it, you have to come to terms with the fact that this is real, that this disease exists. And it could get to me too. Mark Wood: Richard, I have to confess, I was a big fan of your books long before I came to Pomona. I loved, First Light and American Steel, but The Hot zone was maybe the most gripping thing I'd ever read to that point. How do you work? Can you give us a little glimpse of how you actually do your work? Richard Preston: Yeah, I'd love to tell you a little bit about that. In fact, I want to tell you a story about my book, First Light, which is about astronomy and it's about the astronomers at the Palomar Observatory. That book began with a class in astronomy at Pomona College. Robert Chambers was the name of the professor, he taught astronomy. And we had a field trip to the great Palomar Telescope on Palomar Mountain. That's this giant behemoth of a telescope that was built in the 1920s, 1930s. And it was at the time, one of the greatest engineering feats in history. And to this day it remains a powerful and beautiful telescope. So Professor Chambers took us there and I walked around that telescope and I found it to be a magnificent transcendent experience seeing this thing and then learning about the scope, the size of the universe and the microscopic quality of the earth itself. Richard Preston: The earth is just a speck of dust in the galaxy. And if it were to disappear tomorrow, it would not be missed. So that was what led to it. And eventually I ended up spending night after night at the Palomar Telescope with a team of astronomers who were looking as far out into space and time as possible using this instrument. They were looking at quasars, which are essentially black holes that have caught fire, gravitationally. These are gravitational fires burning at the edge of the universe and at the beginning of time, and what could be more magnificent than this quest? Richard Preston: So one of the astronomers was a certain Martin Schmidt, very distinguished older man who was credited as the discoverer of the nature of quasars using that very telescope. He is a [inaudible 00:28:59], tall aristocratic gentleman from the Netherlands. He always dressed in a jacket and tie when he was at the observatory. He was old school, maximum old school. Richard Preston: And then as the night wears on at the telescope and the astronomers are in the control room and they're looking at video screens of galaxies drifting past, Martin Schmidt would disappear. He'd go out and vanish and at some point I said to the astronomers, "What's wrong with Martin? Does he have stomach trouble or something?" I thought maybe he was disappearing into the lavatory and they go, "No, no, no. He's up walking on the catwalk. He does this once in a while." So I thought, "Hmm, and Martin had not been all that communicative with me." So I got my notebook. By the way, I don't use a tape recorder, I use an old fashioned reporter's notebook with a pencil. I find that to be the best. The reason it's the best, well, the story will maybe illustrate it. Richard Preston: So I go up on the catwalk and I find Martin just silently circling the dome on this catwalk, walking always counterclockwise and in silence and looking up at the stars. And so I began to follow him, what else do you do as a reporter? Then I began asking him questions, "So why do you go up here? What do you think about?" And it was one of those moments where you find your subject disarmed and it can often be a gentle quiet moment and one subject can be very reflective. And Martin became reflective and he talked about his childhood, he talked about his thoughts as he walked counterclockwise around the dome. And he was thinking simultaneously about these great fires burning in the edge of the universe. And at the same time, thinking about the constellations, he was the only astronomer I met who could name and identify the constellations in the sky. The others are concentrated on objects that have numbers attached to them. Richard Preston: And then I ended up doing that as an interior monologue in First Light, where I just go inside his head and I describe the stream of his thoughts as he's walking around and around this dome. And then I read it all out loud to Martin and he offered many substantial sensitive changes until what we had in nonfiction was lack of a person thinking and what they're thinking about. Patty Vest: That's great. Richard, let's talk about a little bit more about The Hot Zone, which was made recently into a mini series from National Geographic, with the help of a fellow alum Lynda Obst, Class of '72. I know there's quite a story behind that as well. Can you tell us what happened and how that happened? Richard Preston: Well, sure. The book The Hot Zone began as a long New Yorker article, which attracted a lot of attention from producers in Hollywood and it sparked a studio war between Warner Brothers and Fox. And Warner Brothers, there was a huge producer there named Arnold Kopelson, he won an Academy Award for Platoon, which he was producer of. And he signed up Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman to do a big picture on a big virus, really patterned after The Hot Zone. And then Lynda Obst was very interested in doing The Hot Zone itself. So this guy Kopelson and Lynda got into a huge battle with each other for the rights to the magazine article and later the book. And I ended up talking with both of them on the phone. Richard Preston: Arnold Kopelson was [inaudible 00:33:14] cigar chewing, old school producer. I once met him in his office, which was in the Die Hard building in Los Angeles. That's the building that got blown up in the movie, Die Hard, only it didn't get blown up. Arnold lived there and he's sitting in this giant chair and he's got a gold ring on and a blue suit and he's smoking a cigar. And he says, actually, my brother Doug and I were both meeting him and he [inaudible 00:33:42], "Well, if it isn't the Preston brothers, what have you got for me today?" [inaudible 00:33:48]. Richard Preston: And then there was Lynda Obst calling me on the phone wanting the rights to The Hot Zone. And she was a totally different story. Her background was as a journalist at the New York Times magazine, and she was a Pomona alum and unlike Arnold Kopelson, she was cruelly smart, really bright. And eventually I came down to the idea that in order to get this movie made, I was going to have to tie into a warrior, a producer who could do battle and who could cut throats effectively. And that was Lynda Obst. And at one point she said, "I'm going to go mano a mano with Arnold Kopelson." And I loved that. Richard Preston: So there were really two reasons for going with Lynda. One was that she was Pomona and the other was that she was female. And I wanted to have a woman producer. Women producers, the big powerful ones are extremely rare in Hollywood, but I wanted to be on the right side there. Then Lynda in fact lost the studio war. Fox spent $11 million, they actually built the sets and then the whole thing collapsed when Jodie foster and Robert Redford could not agree on a screenplay. And I was hearing on the phone, from various players in the project, and it was just a train wreck. It was magnificent, unbelievable, a freight train falling into a canyon. That's what it was. It was just [inaudible 00:35:37] terrible. Richard Preston: But then Lynda wouldn't give it up and year after year, every now and then I'd hear from her, "Well, we've got so-and-so on the line and we're going to get into screenplay." Blah, blah, blah. And then finally, finally, she got this deal with National Geographic. It turned out to be a great thing. And as Colonel Nancy Jack said to me, "This should have been a television series all along." Nancy and I agreed on that early in the process. And then after the series was finally made and it was a big success for National Geographic, I said to Lynda, "We could say that this was an odyssey and that you were Odysseus, but in fact, Odysseus was only at sea for 20 years and you've been at sea with this one for 25." Mark Wood: Richard, you mentioned your latest book, Crisis In The Red Zone. At the end of The Hot Zone, you ended it with a line that was very ominous, "Will be back." And it was, and a lot of people thought for a long time, I think that because of the way Ebola was communicated, it probably wouldn't make for pandemic. But then we really saw the potential for that in West Africa. How frightened should we be of Ebola still? Richard Preston: Well, I think he is a very big concern. And as one of the scientists said to me, while I was researching The Hot Zone, that was more than 25 years ago, he said, "We don't really know what Ebola has done in the past and we don't know what it will do in the future." Richard Preston: But there developed a belief among Ebola experts, public health experts, that Ebola had this mythic quality, it was supposedly too hot to be able to successfully establish itself in the human species, that the virus would, "Burn itself out. When it got into people." It was just, "Too deadly." And then as it turned out, the Ebola outbreaks were in village settings where people were not densely crowded and Doctors Without Borders developed a method for suppressing Ebola quickly. Richard Preston: And so, in the end, some public health figures were claiming that The Hot Zone was just scaremongering by a journalist who didn't know anything about public health and science. And then there was this very comfortable belief that Ebola was really not a threat, not much of an issue, easy to handle, not very contagious, blah, blah, blah. But the truth of the matter is that nature often does whatever is necessary to make the most number of experts wrong. Richard Preston: And all those statements about Ebola turned out to be myths. They were part of a belief system by scientists. Scientists and doctors have their belief systems too, but mother nature has a way of overturning belief systems. And so it turned out that when Ebola got into cities, as it did in West Africa, it was about as contagious as seasonal flu. So not quite as contagious as our Coronavirus now, but wickedly difficult to handle once it gets into crowded places. Patty Vest: Richard, this Corona virus pandemic, has coincided with another pandemic we've been dealing with for a while now, one of disinformation and mistrust of experts of all stripes, including media. Do you think we could have handled this crisis better if that didn't happen? Or is that maybe not possible in this post truth era we're living right now? Richard Preston: Well, I think journalists have to be rededicated to their mission and their goals. Some journalists have become corrupted by access to power. Power is intoxicating and you can see it in some of the hosts on Fox News, who seem to be utterly intoxicated with their ability to influence President Donald Trump and the actions of the White House, the executive branch. But that isn't really journalism, that's a form of drunkenness. It's [inaudible 00:40:18] and it's reveling in that. That's one source of false narratives in journalism. Richard Preston: The internet has made it much more difficult to separate truth from non-truth, but the journalists who stick to their jobs and many of whom are willing to sacrifice everything, including their lives, to present the truth to the public, they should be applauded. I regard journalists like that as heroes. I don't consider myself a particularly courageous individual, but journalists who work in countries where they can be killed for what they write or what they present on television and media, are the real heroes of this. I do have faith, it's a faith born perhaps on John Milton's endorsement of the Liberty of Speech, that with free speech comes responsibilities. But that also the public does have the ability to sort truth from fiction even if it takes time. And I don't particularly think that the American people over the long run, are easily fooled. Mark Wood: Richard, we've talked about Coronavirus and the Ebola. Are there other emerging viruses that we already know about that we should be thinking about and preparing for? Richard Preston: I'm sorry, you asked. Yeah, there's one in particular that makes me a little nervous. It's called Nipah, N-I-P-A-H. It's a close relative of the measles virus. Measles is wildly contagious. It's much more contagious than COVID. Richard Preston: So Nipah is a bat virus, it has been leaking into humans in Southeast Asia. It gets into the human body through the lungs and then it migrates to the brain where it causes personality changes, spotty liquefaction of the brain and death. Now, because it's a relative of measles, it appears to have the ability to change. There may be other Nipah's out there in nature that we don't know anything about. But the thing that really chills me is the thought that you could get a fully aerosolized or airborne form of Nipah where people are getting it in their lungs and then they're having personality changes and then their brains are melting. Patty Vest: Yeah. I'm sorry you asked too. Richard Preston: But in fact, Nipah is in fact on the radar screen of public health doctors who think and worry about the next one. And that's why, for example, I don't know what's going on with vaccine development, but I think it would be a really good idea to have platforms of the kind that I mentioned, focusing on Nipah and its relatives for kind of backbone development of vaccines and antiviral drugs. Mark Wood: So there are measles vaccines, so maybe it's one that can be prevented with a vaccine. Richard Preston: Yeah. The measles vaccine would never work on Nipah. But vaccine development for Nipah could happen now, in fact it may be happening, but I doubt there's very much money going into it. But there are people who are dying of Nipah right as we speak. And so when you have human subjects, you have people infected, you have viral strains that you can work with in a laboratory. Patty Vest: Richard, can you tell us a project or a couple of projects you're working on? Or is that top secret? Richard Preston: Well, I have to confess, I'm not going to be writing any more books about viruses for a while. Patty Vest: Well, there seems like there's plenty of content for you. Richard Preston: Yeah. And I don't have it in me to write about the Corona virus. It's a dreadful situation, but I'm not sure I could really contribute in a meaningful way to that story. I've got other things in mind, actually some children's books, just for the heck of it. Patty Vest: I'm looking forward to those. Richard Preston: Thank you. Patty Vest: I have toddlers. Richard Preston: Oh, good. And I can guarantee you that in my children's books there won't be anybody dying with a bloody nose. Patty Vest: Thank you. Mark Wood: So on that note, I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap this up. We've been talking with author Richard Preston, Class of 1976. Thanks for joining us, Richard, it's been fun. Richard Preston: Oh, it's been great to be with you. Good luck, [inaudible 00:45:48] well and stay safe. Patty Vest: Thank you. And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast the podcast of Pomona College. Stay safe. And until next time.