33 pages • 1 hour read
Richard PrestonThe Demon in the Freezer
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Smallpox Freezers
Preston’s title calls attention to the world’s two official smallpox freezers—one at the CDC in Atlanta, the other in Russia—as one of the central sets of symbols in his book. However, what exactly the two freezers signify is not so easy to pin down. It is possible to take the freezers as tangible symbols of the success of smallpox eradication, a process that drove smallpox out of nature and into its twenty-first-century resting places, these two repositories. It is equally possible to understand the freezers as signs of looming danger since it was feared that the CDC would become a 9/11 terrorist target, or as indicators that the victory over smallpox remains incomplete. Smallpox officially resides in the freezers, but whether there are clandestine bioterror stores elsewhere remains an unresolved question.
Anthrax Skulls
Skull anthrax is by its very name a symbol of death or disaster, though there is a further significance to the “skulls” that characterize this anthrax as so ominous. Preston explains that such anthrax is “designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions” (215). This is weapons-grade anthrax, produced using an “anthrax trick” supposedly known only to scientists like Peter Jahrling, a man with high-level security clearance—but in fact known to the perpetrators of bioterror crimes. The anthrax skulls also signify the ease with which sensitive information about bioweapons can be disseminated, and can reach the wrong sources.
Protective Suits
In order to work with diseases, such as smallpox and Ebola, the researchers from USAMRIID must wear full-body protective suits known as “space suits” or “blue suits.” (For the record, Jahrling at one point wears an attention-getting orange protective suit from France.) These specialized suits are the most visible sign of how highly dangerous the research described in The Demon in the Freezer can be, and of how little separates safety from catastrophe. When Lisa Hensley punctures her suit, for instance, she and her colleagues are briefly sent into a panic that centers on whether she has been exposed to live Ebola and on whether her life—thanks to even slight contact—is in danger.
The Child’s Arm
In the very final pages of The Demon in the Freezer, Preston describes the unusual object—the preserved arm of a child who had died from smallpox—that arrives for inspection at USAMRIID. The arm is not in any way capable of spreading smallpox, but it still bears smallpox pustules, and serves as a relic of the battle against smallpox: “What was not present any longer in this hand was the suffering of the child who had endured [smallpox]” (282). This object is a reminder that, at one point, death was the surest release from a disease as harrowing as smallpox. Yet, the arm is also a symbol of the toll in human life that smallpox once ran up, and of the cost to society—from children to adults—that would result should smallpox ever surge back up.
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