Biohazard

Some of the world's greatest bacteriologists and biochemists have studied at Marburg — including Albrecht Kossel, whose research laid the groundwork for the discovery of DNA, and Alexandre Yersin, a codiscoverer of the plague bacterium (named Yersinia pestis after him). The lab in which Marburg was first smeared on a glass slide was itself named after the man credited with founding the science of immunology — Emil von Behring.

A similar virus surfaced nine years later on the banks of the Ebola River in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the time that epidemic died out, 430 people were dead in Zaire and nearby Sudan. The virus responsible for that outbreak was called Ebola, after the site where it was isolated. Ebola struck again in the same area in 1995.

The viruses isolated in Africa differed slightly in genetic composition from the strain found in Germany, but they were closely related. Under an electron microscope, both organisms seemed to proliferate by shooting out tiny filament-like threads, like the lines cast by fishermen, from the cells they had already scoured for the food they needed to grow. The threads were often bent at the top, like fishing hooks, and as they prepared to invade a new cell they curled into rings, like microscopic Cheerios. Marburg and Ebola were deemed to belong to a new family of viral organisms. They were called filoviruses.

We still know very little about where filoviruses come from and how they are transmitted to humans. In some cases an animal or insect bite has delivered the organism into the bloodstream. In others, sexual contact has been a source of infection, and some scientists believe the virus may even be located in plants. Both Ebola and Marburg can spread from one person to another with no direct physical contact. Some victims in Germany and in Africa had merely been in the same room with infected patients. Ebola's mortality rate is between 70 and 90 percent.

The natural reservoirs of filoviruses are unknown. Although recent research suggests that they have been lurking on the fringes of human activity for centuries, Marburg and Ebola joined a new category of "emerging viruses" threatening to eclipse more familiar infectious diseases.

A strain of Marburg arrived in the Soviet Union a decade after it was first isolated, during one of our periodic global searches for promising material. It wasn't clear from the records whether we obtained it from the United States or directly from Germany, but it was immediately added to our growing collection of viral warfare agents. We were already investigating a number of microorganisms that weaken blood vessels and cause hemorrhagic fevers, such as Junin from Argentina and Machupo from Bolivia. Marburg quickly proved to have great potential.

Ustinov had been conducting a series of experiments with guinea pigs and rabbits to monitor the effects of increasingly higher concentrations of Marburg. The injection of such a highly concentrated dose directly into his thumb meant that he now had hundreds, perhaps thousands of times more particles of the virus coursing through his body than any of the victims in Germany. I thought his chances of survival were near zero.

I called our biosafety department and asked them to send technicians at once to the viral center of the Ministry of Defense in Zagorsk, where scientists had isolated a Marburg antiserum. Then I instructed the Ministry of Health to send a team of physicians to Siberia with the serum.

It was a shot in the dark. Koltsovo was four hours away by plane and the next flight from Moscow wasn't until later that night. Even if they made the flight, they would arrive nearly two days after the initial infection — an eternity for Marburg. Zagorsk had only a few hundred milliliters of antiserum on hand.

Kalinin was in a meeting when I asked to see him. Tatyana took one look at me and hurried me into his office. He dismissed his visitors, and I gave him the scanty details I had of what had happened.

"I'm waiting for a cryptogram from Vector, but it looks to me like we have a dead person on our hands," I said.

Kalinin turned pale.

"You don't think he can be saved?" he asked.

"I can't be too optimistic."

"We'll have to tell the higher levels," he said with a grimace.

I couldn't blame him for being as preoccupied with our superiors' reaction as with Ustinov's well-being. We both knew that any major accident would put Biopreparat at risk. Memories of the Sverdlovsk catastrophe's effect on the army's program were still vivid. This was less than two years after Chernobyl; the Soviet Union was in no mood for a new disaster.