Fighting Fire with Fire
One day in May in 1796, a man scratched the arm of a young boy and proceed to purposely infect him with cowpox which he had previously acquired by scraping at an infected blister of a young woman working at a dairy farm. Several months later, this man once again scratched the arm of this young boy, only this time he proceeded to purposely infect him with the more lethal smallpox virus. And that is the story of one the strangest ironies in human history: the most effective protection against dying from a lethal virus is to be purposely infected with a much milder strain of a virus so that the magic of immunity can take place.
Viruses are Necessary
Anyone who survived the year 2020 will confirm this: viruses are a pain in the neck. They are bad news which is why big money and a lot of time are spent trying to destroy them. It is enough to dream about a world without viruses. But that would ironically be a nightmare:
“If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects."
Smallpox Eradication
Smallpox is thought to be the single greatest killer of humanity ever, claiming more victims than the plague of the Middle Ages. The idea of eradicating it from the history of human civilization was just a dream for most of mankind, but finally it happened. The irony which stimulated this book is mankind decided to preserve the virus in freezers rather than destroy all remaining vestiges of it forever.
Bioterrorism
Smallpox killed more humans than all the murderers of history combined. It was an existential threat, but one outside the hands of man, belonging only to Mother Nature. By preserving the “demon” in those freezers, smallpox ironically became for the first time a potential way for humans to finally use to kill themselves with the natural order of things no longer part of the equation.
The Hand of Man
For the most part, the author avoids pontifications and philosophy in this straightforward account of little-known history. At one point, he puts that aside and becomes almost poetic in his accounting of the irony of humanity’s position relative to all other living creatures:
“The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.”
