PANDORA'S GAMBLE

Deadly germs escape from advanced laboratories with alarming and perhaps catastrophic consequences, according to this sobering nonfiction book.

Investigative journalist Young, who’s worked as a reporter and editor for such outlets as USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explores lapses, accidents, and disasters at high-containment Biosafety Level 2, 3, and 4 laboratories around the world. They include a 1978 smallpox outbreak at a lab at Britain’s Birmingham University that resulted in the world’s last smallpox death (in which the remorseful lab director committed suicide); a 1979 anthrax release from a Soviet bioweapons lab in Sverdlovsk, which killed dozens of people; several leaks of contaminated wastewater at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick biological research institute in 2018, which may have traveled to the nearby town of Frederick, Maryland; a lab tech’s death from a bacterial infection in a San Francisco Veterans Administration medical center; several leaks of a SARS-associate coronavirus from Asian labs in 2003 and 2004, resulting in one death; and the exposure of lab workers to engineered microbes during “gain of function” research that seeks to make pathogens more infectious. A lengthy chapter explores the possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Young dives deeply into how lab safeguards can fail because of equipment breakdowns, leaky pipes, holes in biohazard suits, mislabeled vials, accidental needle sticks, and other circumstances. The book also offers an absorbing account of Young’s own dogged reporting as she visits labs (she once found a high-tech containment-lab door sealed shut with duct tape), pries information out of reluctant officials, and receives tips from anonymous sources. She renders scientific issues in lucid, accessible prose that vividly conveys the insidious nature of potentially lethal microbes: “Other liquid or solid particles were so small they became airborne, spreading on invisible air currents, pushed along by heating and cooling systems, the opening and closing of doors, and the movement of people between rooms and down hallways.” Throughout, Young shows just how perilous infectious-disease research can be.

A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat.