Power Is Pestilence
The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston is the alluring story of calamitous disease, smallpox, and the power that comes with the possession of the disease in the hands of a potentially belligerent government set through a timeline of events occurring on range of cases of smallpox before its eradication and after the 9/11 attacks. Preston tells the tale of smallpox by setting examples of the disease affecting many parts of the world and how after the eradication, the governments with the virus started to collect samples to store in frozen, underground, hidden laboratories in the middle of nowhere. The fear of a virus that could “...[kill] roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth” (Preston 23). The story also points out that governments would have the power to create bioweapons that would spread pestilence wherever they want, and that it should be the world’s responsibility to completely eradicate the virus and keep such impromptu governments under control. Such a question requires a lot of ethical questioning which is what Preston attempts to assist with in the book to give the reader a choice of morality while discussing the facts about the case.
In The Demon in the Freezer, a big point is presented to the reader and that the point is that the United States has the biggest…show more content… The format of the book is organized in such a way that the reader can understand the risks of variola research and can relate and answer the underlying ethical questions that Preston presents throughout the book in order to leave the reader questioning the research on disease and what its effects will be on the world and the risks that come with governments’ ability to store the disease for potential
