Richard Preston

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“This Is A Kind Of War With A Non-Human Enemy”

August 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The numbers tell us that there’ll likely be another global pandemic someday, the population density always demands it, but it won’t likely be the Ebola virus. That doesn’t mean it’s any less horrifying for the people suffering from it or those treating the patients. Richard Preston, an Ebola expert who’s written on the topic in his book, The Hot Zone, and in the New Yorker, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A trio of exchanges follow.

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Question:

Is any of the panic surrounding Ebola justified?

Richard Preston:

Not entirely justified. This is a kind of war with a non-human enemy. It is a fairly clever and very aggressive enemy. However, if you are in a jam it is never a good idea to panic. That’s how you lose. The doctors in Africa definitely are not panicking, they are just working 20 hours a day in the fight. And we sure don’t have to panic in the US, we’ve got a strong medical care system.

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Question:

How can the doctors and nurses prevent themselves from getting the virus as they help others?

Richard Preston:

They haven’t been able to fully protect themselves, doctors and nurses are dying. They’re wearing full protection biohazard suits, but the Ebola wards are just horrifying, 30 Ebola patients with one doctor and one nurse, both in space suits. Conditions are awful in those wards, we need more doctors and nurses – not even a space suit can totally protect you if the ward is really a mess.

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Question:

What do you think about this experimental serum that we heard about being used on Thursday? Something that is directly contributing to the two Americans’ recovery, or not necessarily the case?

Also, are there any common lasting effects among those that manage to live through Ebola? All I’ve heard about is some joint problems and whatnot, but I would’ve expected there to be much more severe aftereffects.

Richard Preston:

Good q’s – the antibody serum ZMAPP seems to be amazingly effective but we don’t know because it’s only been tried on the two patients. As for aftereffects, i interviewed Dr. Shem Musoke who nearly died of Marburg (close cousin of Ebola) and he told me it took him about a year to recover fully but now he was fine. It’s a crushing disease but if you survive you do recover.•

 

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“Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky Recently Built A Supercomputer In His Apartment From Mail-Order Parts”

February 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gregory Chudnovsky (pictured) and his brother, David, are Distinguished Industry Professors at NYU's Polytechnic Institute. (Image by Gregory Chudnovsky / NYU.)

The first two paragraphs of “Mountains of Pi,” Richard Preston’s excellent 1992 New Yorker account of eccentric math geniuses, the Chudnovsky brothers, and their home-built supercomputer:

“Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky recently built a supercomputer in his apartment from mail-order parts. Gregory Chudnovsky is a number theorist. His apartment is situated near the top floor of a run-down building on the West Side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood near Columbia University. Not long ago, a human corpse was found dumped at the end of the block. The world’s most powerful supercomputers include the Cray Y-MP C90, the Thinking Machines CM-5, the Hitachi S-820/80, the nCube, the Fujitsu parallel machine, the Kendall Square Research parallel machine, the nec SX-3, the Touchstone Delta, and Gregory Chudnovsky’s apartment. The apartment seems to be a kind of container for the supercomputer at least as much as it is a container for people.

Gregory Chudnovsky’s partner in the design and construction of the supercomputer was his older brother, David Volfovich Chudnovsky, who is also a mathematician, and who lives five blocks away from Gregory. The Chudnovsky brothers call their machine m zero. It occupies the former living room of Gregory’s apartment, and its tentacles reach into other rooms. The brothers claim that m zero is a ‘true, general-purpose supercomputer,’ and that it is as fast and powerful as a somewhat older Cray Y-MP, but it is not as fast as the latest of the Y-MP machines, the C90, an advanced supercomputer made by Cray Research. A Cray Y-MP C90 costs more than thirty million dollars. It is a black monolith, seven feet tall and eight feet across, in the shape of a squat cylinder, and is cooled by liquid freon. So far, the brothers have spent around seventy thousand dollars on parts for their supercomputer, and much of the money has come out of their wives’ pockets.”

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