Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science

by Richard Preston

  This puzzled me, why the Chudnovskys didn’t want their names used. The answer, as I finally figured out, had to do with the nature of mathematics as a human activity. Mathematics is not strictly science, nor is it absolutely art. Mathematics is both objectively rigorous and highly creative, and so it spans the divide between the two worlds, and expresses the unity of science and art. In effect, mathematics is a cathedral of the intellect, built over thousands of years, displaying some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit. The Chudnovsky brothers saw themselves as anonymous workers adding a few details to the cathedral. Their names didn’t matter.

  When I had finally gotten their reluctant assent to let me write about them as people and had finished drafting “The Mountains of Pi,” a fact-checker from The New Yorker named Hal Espen paid a visit to the Chudnovsky brothers in order to verify the facts in my piece. Soon afterward, Gregory phoned me in a state of indignation. Hal Espen had spent a long time in Gregory’s apartment, looking at the things I’d described and asking the brothers many questions. At one point, he wanted to confirm that Gregory owned hand-sewn socks made of scraps of cloth, as I had written, so he asked Gregory if he could see his socks. Gregory wasn’t wearing them, so Espen ended up looking in one of the drawers of Gregory’s dresser, where he found the socks and verified my description of them. “He was a nice guy, but why did he have to rifle through my socks?” Gregory demanded.*1 If the names of the cathedral workers didn’t matter, their socks mattered even less. But Gregory Chudnovsky’s socks mattered deeply to me, for the same reason that the color of Nancy Jaax’s eyes and the scar on her hand mattered. The business of a writer, in the end, is human character, human story. Unlike a novelist, a narrative nonfiction writer cannot make up details of character. For the nonfiction writer, details must be found where they exist, like diamonds lying in the dust, unnoticed by passing crowds.

  In exploring biology, I moved my focus away from the smallest life-forms—viruses—and began climbing the coast redwood trees of California. The coast redwoods are the largest individual living things in nature. Redwoods can be nearly forty stories tall; they would stand out in midtown Manhattan. In order to climb a redwood, you put on a harness and ascend hundreds of feet up a rope into the redwood canopy. It’s like scuba diving, except that you go into the air. The canopy is the aerial part of a forest, and it is an unseen world, invisible from the ground. Once you have ascended into the redwood canopy, which is the world’s tallest canopy, you dangle in midair, in a harness, around thirty stories above the ground. You are suspended from ropes attached to branches overhead. You move through the air while hanging on ropes, sometimes going from tree to tree. The redwood canopy is a lost world, unexplored, out of sight, teeming with unknown life. After writing a book about it (The Wild Trees), I learned of the existence of an unexplored rain-forest canopy in eastern North America; I hadn’t known there were rain forests in the East. This eastern rain forest was being destroyed by parasites invading the ecosystem. It was an unseen world that was vanishing even before it had been explored by humans. Thus an interest in giant life-forms ended up returning me to a focus on small things: “A Death in the Forest.”

  “The Search for Ebola” is about the search for the unknown host of the Ebola virus, and it narrates an outbreak of Ebola in Congo. In researching it, I ended up talking with a medical doctor named William T. Close. Bill Close, who is the father of the actress Glenn Close, had been the head of the main hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo (then called Zaire). Then, while I was staying late in the offices of The New Yorker on a Friday night—closing time, when the magazine is put to bed—I telephoned Dr. Close for a last-minute fact-checking conversation. In about ten minutes (I had been told) the magazine would be closed—finished—and would be transmitted electronically to the printing plant in Danville, Kentucky. That was when Dr. Close told me the story of a Belgian doctor who had performed a terrifying act that could be called an Ebola kiss, with a patient in an Ebola ward.

  “Oh, my God,” I blurted.

  I asked someone to go find Tina Brown, the editor, and see if the magazine could be held open for a little while, as a doctor was saying something. It was okay with Brown, but there was no time to take notes. I asked Close to tell me the story again, while I scrawled sentences describing the Ebola kiss on a sheet of paper. With Close waiting on the line, I carried the paper over to the make-up department (an office where the magazine’s compositors worked at computer screens) and I handed it to Pat Keogh, the head of make-up, who typed my scrawl into the master electronic proof. Almost immediately, the passage was reviewed for grammar by The New Yorker’s grammarian, a quiet person named Ann Goldstein. (Experts who are being quoted in The New Yorker are encouraged not to use bad grammar.)

  Minutes later, with Bill Close still waiting on the telephone, we heard that his grammar was okay, and we heard that the magazine had been transmitted electronically to the printing plant. I said good night to the now-eponymous Dr. Close and hung up.

  That was when something struck me. How could I have been so stupid? I had forgotten to ask Close what had happened to the Belgian doctor afterward. He would have died a grisly death. Years later, I learned what had transpired, and you will read it here.

  In “The Human Kabbalah,” I explored the decoding of the human DNA and the resulting fantastic stock-market bubble that made the genomic scientist J. Craig Venter a billionaire for a while. One day, while working on this story, I was hanging out in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith—one of the great figures in the history of molecular biology—and I mentioned to him that I was having trouble, as a writer, describing DNA in a physical sense. I wanted readers to get a concrete picture of it in their minds. “The trouble is, DNA is invisible,” I said to Hamilton Smith.

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. He asked me if I’d ever seen it. I hadn’t, so he dribbled some purified DNA out of a test tube. It looked like clear snot.

  “What does it taste like?” I asked him.

  That surprised him a little. He didn’t know. In almost forty years of research with DNA, Hamilton Smith had never tasted the molecule.

  As soon as I got home, I ordered some pure, dried DNA through the mail. It arrived: a bit of fluff in a bottle. I put some of it on my tongue. Sure enough, it had a taste. In taking notes, it is useful to remember that all the senses can be involved.

  I continued to follow the Chudnovsky brothers and their journeys in the universe of numbers. This led them, with me trailing behind, to the mysterious Unicorn Tapestries, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of New York. All the while, I was researching the curious genetic disease that causes people to mutilate and even, in effect, cannibalize their own bodies—Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

  The disease was almost unbearable to contemplate, and at first almost impossible to describe. It made its victims seem inhuman. I couldn’t find a way into the writing of the story, despite spending months and finally years on it. Ultimately, the last chapter of this book took me seven years to write. The disease probably could not be invented by a fiction writer, or if it were invented, it would not seem believable. Yet there it was, an undeniable reality. I needed to understand, if possible, what it might feel like to have this disease. I wanted to try to connect the seemingly unknowable experience of self-cannibalism to that of common humanity. Henry Fielding, in his famous preface to his novel The History of Tom Jones, in which he defined the basic terms of fiction writing, quoted Terence: “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” If people with Lesch-Nyhan disease were human, then they could not be alien to us. The only way to find humanity in the story was to climb into the soup with two people who had been born with the disease and start taking notes.

  The Mountains of Pi

  WHEN HE WAS THIRTY-SIX, Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky began to build a supercomputer in his apartment from mail-order parts. Gregory Chudnovsky was a number theorist, a mathematician who studies numbers, and he felt that he needed a supercomp
uter to do it. His apartment was situated near the top floor of a run-down building at the corner of 120th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, on the West Side of Manhattan. Around the time he decided to build the supercomputer, a corpse was found stuffed into a garbage can at the end of his block. The project officially took two years, though in reality it never ended. At the time he began the project, the world’s most powerful supercomputers included the Cray series, the Thinking Machines arrays, the Hitachi line of supercomputers, the nCube, the Fujitsu machine, the Kendall Square Research machine, the NEC supercomputer, the Touchstone Delta, and Gregory Chudnovsky’s apartment. The apartment was a kind of container for the supercomputer at least as much as it was a container for people.

  Gregory Chudnovsky’s partner in the design and construction of the supercomputer was his older brother, David Volfovich Chudnovsky. (“Volfovich” means “Son of Wolf.”) David was also a number theorist, and he lived five blocks away from Gregory. The Chudnovsky brothers were reluctant to give a name to their machine. To them, it was a household appliance that could help with their investigation of numbers. You didn’t give a name to your toaster oven, so why would you give a name to your supercomputer?

  When I pressed the Chudnovsky brothers to give me some sort of a name for it, they shrugged and said it was nothing.

  “I don’t want to call it nothing,” I said to the brothers.

  “Why not?” David answered. However, he said, as a convenience I could refer to it as “m zero.”

  At any rate, the “zero” in the machine’s name hinted at a history of failures—three previous duds in Gregory’s apartment, three homemade supercomputers that hadn’t worked. The brothers referred to these machines as negative three, negative two, and negative one. The brothers broke them up for scrap, and they got on the telephone and ordered more parts.

  Whatever the supercomputer was, it filled the former living room of Gregory’s apartment, and its tentacles reached into other rooms. The brothers claimed that m zero was a “true, general-purpose supercomputer” and that it would turn out to be as fast and powerful as a Cray Y-MP. A Cray Y-MP had a sticker price of more than thirty million dollars. A Cray was a black cylinder seven feet tall, and it was cooled by liquid freon. The brothers spent around seventy thousand dollars on parts for their supercomputer, and much of the money came out of their wives’ pockets. Seventy thousand dollars was a little more than two-tenths of one percent of the cost of a Cray.

  It was safe to say that Gregory Chudnovsky was one of the world’s leading architects of supercomputers. He had an ability to see the design of a supercomputer in his mind’s eye. He liked to imagine supercomputers that might never be built, like an architect who dreams of towers and cities in a splendid future. M zero was incredibly fast. Gregory called it a relativistic machine, because he had woven the design of the machine around Einstein’s theory of special relativity. M zero’s network of processors shuttled numbers around it so fast that the different parts of the machine operated in slightly different space-times.

  Gregory Chudnovsky had a spare frame and a bony, handsome face. He had a long beard, streaked with gray, and dark, unruly hair, a wide forehead, and wide-spaced brown eyes. He walked in a slow, dragging shuffle, leaning on a bentwood cane, while his brother, David, typically held him under one arm, to prevent him from toppling over. He had myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder of the muscles. The symptoms, in his case, were muscular weakness and difficulty in breathing. “I have to lie in bed most of the time,” Gregory told me. His condition seemed to be getting gradually worse. He developed the disease when he was twelve years old, in the city of Kiev, Ukraine, where he and David grew up. In those days, Ukraine was part of the old Soviet Union. Now Gregory spent his days sitting or lying in a bed heaped with pillows, in his bedroom down the hall from the room that housed the supercomputer. Gregory’s bedroom was filled with paper. It contained, by my estimate and the calculation of a New Yorker fact-checker, at least one ton of paper. He called his bedroom his junkyard. The room faced east. It would have been full of sunlight in the morning if he’d ever raised the shades, but he kept them lowered, because light hurt his eyes.

  You almost never met one of the Chudnovsky brothers without the other. You usually found the brothers conjoined, like Siamese twins, David holding Gregory by the arm or under the armpits, speaking to him tenderly, cautioning him to be careful not to fall or hurt himself. They worked together so closely that they claimed to be a single mathematician who by chance happened to occupy two human bodies. They completed each other’s sentences and interrupted each other, but they didn’t look completely alike. While Gregory was thin and bearded, David was portly, with a plump, clean-shaven face. David’s manner was refined and aristocratic. Black-and-gray curly hair grew thickly on top of his head, and he had heavy-lidded pale blue eyes, which had a melancholy look. He always wore a starched white shirt and, usually, a muted silk necktie. His tie rested on a bulging stomach.

  The Chudnovskian supercomputer, m zero, burned two thousand watts of power. It ran day and night. The brothers didn’t dare shut it down; they were afraid it would die if they did. At least twenty-five fans blew air through the machine to keep it cool; otherwise something might melt. Waste heat permeated Gregory’s apartment, and the room that contained the supercomputer climbed to more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The brothers kept the apartment’s lights turned off as much as possible. If they switched on too many lights while m zero was running, they feared they might start an electrical fire. Gregory couldn’t breathe city air without developing lung trouble, so he kept the apartment’s windows closed all the time. He had air conditioners running in them during the summer, but that didn’t seem to reduce the heat. As the temperature climbed on hot days, the inside of the apartment smelled of cooking circuit boards, a sign that m zero was not well. A steady stream of boxes arrived by Federal Express, and an opposing stream of boxes flowed back to mail-order houses, containing parts that had overheated, failed, bombed, or acted strange, along with letters from the brothers demanding an exchange or their money back. The building superintendent didn’t know that the Chudnovsky brothers were using a supercomputer in Gregory’s apartment. The brothers were afraid he would find out.

  The Chudnovskys, between them, had published more than a hundred and fifty papers and twelve books, mostly on the subject of number theory or mathematical physics. They lived in Kiev until 1977, when they left the Soviet Union and, accompanied by their parents, went to France. The family lived there for six months, where David fell in love with a French diplomat named Nicole Lannegrace, and they were married. The Chudnovsky brothers, along with their parents and Nicole Lannegrace, immigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where Nicole became a diplomat with the United Nations. The brothers eventually became American citizens.

  The brothers enjoyed an official relationship with Columbia University: Columbia called them senior research scientists in the Department of Mathematics, but they didn’t have tenure, they didn’t teach students, and they didn’t attend faculty meetings. They were lone inventors, operating out of Gregory’s apartment. Gregory’s wife, Christine Pardo Chudnovsky, was an attorney with a midtown law firm. She had been an undergraduate at Columbia University when Gregory arrived there, and she’d fallen in love with him at first sight. Nicole Lannegrace’s salary as a U.N. diplomat and Christine’s as a lawyer helped cover much of the funding needs of the brothers’ supercomputing complex in Gregory and Christine’s apartment. Gregory and David’s mother, Malka Benjaminovna Chudnovsky, a retired engineer, was living with Gregory and Christine and was in poor health. David spent his days in Gregory’s apartment, taking care of his brother, their mother, and m zero.

  When the Chudnovskys applied to leave the Soviet Union, it attracted the attention of the KGB. The brothers happened to be friends with the physicist Andrei Sakharov, a key inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, who had later become a human-rights activist and a propon
ent of nuclear disarmament, getting himself into serious trouble with the Kremlin. The Chudnovskys’ association with Sakharov, as well as the fact that they were Jewish and mathematical, attracted at least a dozen KGB agents to their case. The brothers’ father, Volf Grigorevich Chudnovsky (“Wolf, Son of Gregory”) was severely beaten by KGB agents in 1977. Volf died in 1985, in New York City, of what the brothers believed were lingering effects of his torture. Volf Chudnovsky was a professor of civil engineering at the Kiev Architectural Institute, and he specialized in the structural stability of buildings, towers, and bridges. Not long before he died, he constructed in Gregory’s apartment a labyrinth of bookshelves, his last work of civil engineering. Volf’s bookshelves extended into every corner of the apartment, and they had become packed with literature and computer books and books on history and art and, above all, books and papers on the subject of numbers. Since almost all numbers run to infinity (in digits) and are totally unexplored, an apartment full of writings on numbers holds hardly any knowledge about numbers at all. Numbers, and the patterns of relationships among them, are powerful, deep, and mysterious. It is not at all clear that the human mind evolved in such a way that it is very much able to understand numbers. But it helps to have a supercomputer on the premises to advance the work.

  ONE DAY, I called the Columbia University math department trying to find out how to make contact with the Chudnovskys. I had read a short news item about them but could learn very little that was definite. They were reportedly living somewhere in New York City. However, they did not seem to be listed in the Manhattan telephone book, and they didn’t have an unlisted telephone number, either. (I learned later that they actually were listed in the Manhattan telephone book but under a nonexistent name.) “The Chudnovskys?” the person who answered the phone at Columbia said. “I have no idea where they are. We haven’t seen them around here in a long time. I have an old phone number for them. Somebody said it doesn’t work anymore.”