The Demon in the Freezer

Jumper

Somewhere between ten thousand and three thousand years ago, smallpox jumped from an unknown animal into a person and began to spread. It was an emerging virus that made a trans-species jump into people from a host in nature. Viruses have many means of survival, and one of the most important is a virus’s ability to change natural hosts. Species become extinct; viruses move on.

There is something impressive about the trans-species jump of a virus. The event seems random yet full of purpose, like an unfurling of wings or a flash of stripes as a predator makes a rush. A virus exists in countless strains, or quasi-species, that are changing all the time yet are stable as a whole; together, they make a species. The quasi-species of a virus are like the surface of a flowing rapids, buffeted and shaped by the forces of natural selection. The form of the virus is stable, even while the edges and surface of the river are ever in motion and shifting a little, and the river of the virus always seeks new outlets. If a particular strain of a virus that lives in an animal manages to invade a person, it may be able to replicate there, and it may get to someone else. If it keeps moving, the result is an unbroken chain of human-to-human transmission. The virus has opened a new channel to immortality. This is what HIV did about fifty years ago in central or west Africa, when two different types of HIV seem to have jumped out of sooty mangabey monkeys and chimpanzees, and began spreading in people. Very often, when a virus jumps species, it is particularly lethal in its new host.

There are many poxviruses in nature, and they infect species that gather in swarms and herds, circulating among them like pickpockets at a fair. There are two principal kinds of poxviruses: the poxes of vertebrates and the poxes of insects. Pox hunters have so far discovered mousepox, monkeypox, skunkpox, pigpox, goatpox, camelpox, cowpox, pseudo-cowpox, buffalopox, gerbilpox, several deerpoxes, chamoispox, a couple of sealpoxes, turkeypox, canarypox, pigeonpox, starlingpox, peacockpox, sparrowpox, juncopox, mynahpox, quailpox, parrotpox, and toadpox. There’s mongolian horsepox, a pox called Yaba monkey tumor, and a pox called orf. There’s dolphinpox, penguinpox, two kangaroopoxes, raccoonpox, and quokkapox. (The quokka is an Australian wallaby.) Snakes catch snakepox, spectacled caimans suffer from spectacled caimanpox, and crocodiles get crocpox. “Generally speaking, when crocodiles get crocpox, you see these bumps on them. I don’t think it’s particularly nasty for a croc,” a poxvirus expert named Richard Moyer said to me. “My guess is that fish get poxes, but nobody’s looked much for fish with pox,” Moyer said.

Insects are tortured by poxviruses. There are three groups of insect poxviruses: the beetlepoxes, the butterflypoxes (which include the mothpoxes), and the poxes of flies, including the mosquitopoxes. Any attempt to get to the bottom of the insect poxes would be like trying to enumerate the nine billion names of God.

Insects don’t have skin — they have exoskeletons — and so they can’t pustulate. Instead, poxviruses drive insects mad. A caterpillar that has caught a pox becomes nervous. It staggers around in circles on a leaf, agitated and losing its balance, and it can’t seem to find its way. (This may be a caterpillar’s version of “the anxious face of smallpox.”) The caterpillar’s development is interrupted, and the caterpillar keeps on growing bigger, until it is twice normal size. The virus is making its host larger — a nice way for a virus to amplify itself. Eventually the insect is transformed and destroyed, ending up as a swollen bag filled with a soup of insect guts and tiny crystalline nuggets that look like Wiffle balls. This soup is technically known as a virus melt. Each opening of each Wiffle ball in the melt ends up containing a particle of insect pox. The insect pox virions are inserted into the Wiffle balls and protrude from them like the knobs on a mine.

The caterpillar dies clinging to a leaf, and splits open, and out pours a spreading virus melt. The guts decay and are gone, leaving behind the Wiffle balls, which can persist for years in the environment. One day, a caterpillar comes along and eats the viral equivalent of a land mine, and melts down, and so it goes for hundreds of millions of years in the happy life of an insect pox.

No fossils of viruses have ever been found in rocks, so the origin of viruses is shrouded in mystery. Viruses are presumably very ancient, and may be similar to the earliest forms of life that appeared on the earth more than three and a half billion years ago. The insect poxes may have arisen in early Devonian times, long before the age of dinosaurs, when the seas teemed with sharks and armored fish, and the earth was covered with mosses and small plants, and there were still no trees, and the first insects were evolving. Some experts feel that the poxes of vertebrates could be the descendants of insect poxes. Smallpox, too, looks like the knobs on the Wiffle ball, though without the ball. Perhaps there was a trans-species jump of an insect pox into a newt some three hundred and fifty million years ago. Perhaps the knobs fell off the Wiffle ball when the pox got into the newt, and we are living with the consequences today.

At least two known midgepoxes torment midges. Grasshoppers are known to suffer from at least six different grasshopperpoxes. If a plague of African locusts breaks out with locustpox, the plague is hit with a plague, and is in deep trouble. Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. 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. Viruses are nature’s crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry. For most of human history, the human species consisted of small, scattered groups of hunter-gatherers. The human species did not collect in crowds, and so it was almost beneath the notice of a pox.

With the growth of agriculture, the human population of the earth swelled and became more tightly packed. Villages grew into towns, and towns grew into cities, and people began to live in crowds in river valleys where the land was fertile. At that point, the human species became an accident with a poxvirus waiting to happen.

Epidemiologists have done some mathematics on the spread of smallpox, and they’ve found that the virus needs a population of around two hundred thousand people living within fourteen days of travel from one another or the virus can’t keep its life cycle going, and it dies out. Those conditions did not occur until the appearance of settled agricultural areas and cities, about seven thousand years ago. Smallpox could be described as the first urban virus.

The virus’s genes suggest that it was once a rodent virus. Smallpox might once have lived in a rodent that multiplied in storage bins of grain. Perhaps, perhaps not. Smallpox might be a former pox of mice, or it might be a ratpox that moved on. Maybe, maybe not. There is, however, a strong suspicion that smallpox made its trans-species jump into humans in one of the early agricultural river valleys — perhaps in the valley of the Nile, or along the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, or in the Indus River valley, or possibly along the rivers in China. By 400 B.C., the population of China had grown to twenty-five million people, which was probably the largest and densest collection of people at that time, and they were crowded along the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Down by the river somewhere, the pox found its human lover.

The mummy of the Pharaoh Ramses V, who died suddenly as a young man in 1157 B.C., lies inside a glass case in the Cairo Museum. His body is speckled with yellow blisters on his face, forearms, and scrotum. It looks like a centrifugal rash. Pox experts would very much like to look at the soles of the pharaoh’s feet and the palms of his hands, to see if there are any blisters on them, for that would be a sharp diagnostic sign of smallpox. But the pharaoh’s feet are wrapped in cloth, and his hands are crossed over his chest, palms downward, and the authorities at the Cairo Museum will not allow anyone to move them. Pox experts would also like to clip out a bit of the pharaoh’s skin and test it for the DNA of smallpox virus, but so far that has not been allowed either.

Another possibility for the point of contact between humans and variola is Southeast Asia around 1000 B.C. Crowded city-states were developing there. Or the original host of smallpox may have been an African squirrel that lived in a crescent of green forests that are thought to have once existed along the southern reaches of the Nile River. The climate dried out, the forests disappeared or were cut down by people, the country turned into grasslands, and the squirrel became extinct. Variola moved on.

It is possible that variola caused the plague of Athens in 430 B.C., which killed Pericles and dealt the city a devastating blow during the opening years of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Variola may have caused the Antonine Plague in Rome, which seems to have been carried home by Roman legions who fought in Syria in A.D. 164. Certainly smallpox rooted itself early in people living in the river valleys of China. The Chinese worshiped a goddess of smallpox named T’ou-Shen Niang-Niang, who could cure the disease. There was another goddess, Pan-chen, to whom people prayed if a victim’s skin began to darken with black pox. In A.D. 340, the great Chinese medical doctor Ko Hung gave an exact description of smallpox. He believed that the disease had first come to China “from the west,” about three hundred years before his lifetime.

Variola may have caused a decline in the human population of Italy during the later years of the Roman empire, making the empire more vulnerable to collapse under barbarian attacks. (The population of Italy in late Roman times may also have been gutted by malaria, or perhaps by a double whammy of malaria plus smallpox.) Variola dwelled along the Ganges River in India for at least the past two thousand years. The Hindu religion has a goddess of smallpox, named Shitala Ma, and there are temples in her honor all over India. (Ma means the same in Hindi as it does in English—“mother.”) It is hard to say whether Shitala Ma is a good goddess or a bad one, but you certainly do not want to make her mad. In ancient Japan, smallpox arrived once in a while from China and Korea, but the virus couldn’t start a chain of transmission there because the population was too thin. Eventually, around A.D. 1000, the population in Japan reached four and a half million, and apparently two hundred thousand people began to live within about two weeks’ travel from one another; smallpox came to live with them, and they came to think of smallpox as a demon. In A.D. 910, the Persian physician al-Razi (Rhazes) saw a lot of smallpox when he was the medical director of the Baghdad hospital. Ancient sub-Saharan Africa had a relatively scattered human population and remained largely free of smallpox, except for occasional outbreaks along the coasts, triggered by the comings and goings of traders and slavers. The more concentrated the human population, the more likely it was to be thinned regularly by variola.

In 1520, Captain Pánfilo de Narváez landed on the east coast of what is now Mexico, near Vera Cruz. His plan was to investigate the Aztec empire, which was centered in great and powerful inland cities. One of the members of Captain Narváez’s landing party was an African slave who was sick with smallpox. Variola hatched from tiny spots in the man’s mouth and amplified itself into a biological shockwave that ran from the seacoast back into the Aztec empire, ultimately killing roughly half of the human population of Mexico. The wave of death that came out of less than a square inch of membrane in the mouth of Captain Narváez’s man went through Central America, and it boomed along the spine of the Andes, where it gobsmacked the Inca empire. By the time the Spanish conquerors entered Peru, smallpox had softened the place up, and had killed so many people that the armies of the Incas had trouble putting up effective resistance. Smallpox had reduced the population of the Western Hemisphere while showing itself to be the most powerful de facto biological weapon the world has yet seen. (Measles was also lethal in Native American populations, and it worked alongside variola in the Americas.) During the French and Indian War, when Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribes was leading a siege against the British at Fort Detroit in 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the head of the British forces, wrote a letter to one of his field officers, Colonel Henry Bouquet: “Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians?” Amherst asked. “We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”

Colonel Bouquet got the idea of the stratagem quite well, and his reply was to the point: “I will try to inoculate the [buggers] with some blankets that may fall into their hands.” Not long afterward, one Captain Ecuyer, a British soldier, wrote in his journal: “Out of our regard for [two visiting chiefs] we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” It did, and smallpox subsequently burned through the human population of the Ohio River valley, killing considerable numbers of Native Americans. This was strategic biological warfare, and it worked well, at least from the English point of view.

Vision

In the late seventeen hundreds, the English country doctor Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaids who had contracted cowpox seemed to be protected from smallpox, and he decided to try an experiment. On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus “the Vaccine Virus”—the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy’s arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient — today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination — the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. “It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice,” Jenner wrote in 1801.

In 1965, Donald Ainslie Henderson was thirty-six years old and was the head of disease surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, when he wrote a proposal for the eradication of smallpox in west Africa. In common with most medical authorities at the time, he didn’t believe that smallpox or any other infectious disease could be eradicated from the planet, but he thought that perhaps it could be done in a region. Somehow, his proposal ended up at the White House and had an effect there. For years, the Soviets had been getting up at meetings of the World Health Assembly — the international body that approves the WHO’s programs — and demanding the global eradication of smallpox, and now Lyndon Johnson decided to endorse the idea. It was a political move to help improve Soviet-American relations. Henderson was abruptly called to Washington to meet with a top official in the U.S. Public Health Service, James Watts, who informed him that he was going to WHO headquarters in Geneva to put together such a program.

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“You’re ordered to go,” Watts said.

“Suppose I refuse?”

“Then you will resign from government service.”

Henderson assumed that the attempt to eradicate smallpox would fail in about eighteen months. He told his wife, Nana, and their three children that they were going to stay in Geneva for a little while, until the program fell apart and they could come home. They put most of their things in storage in Atlanta and arrived in Geneva on the first of November. The Henderson family settled into a bungalow near Lake Geneva, not very far from the town where variola had been given its official name in A.D. 580, and they rented a refrigerator, since D.A. felt they weren’t going to be there long. They would not see their stored things for another twelve years.

The Eradication program was built on the idea that variola has one great weakness: it is able to replicate only inside the human body. People have become its only natural host. Wherever it had come from in nature, it had actually lost the ability to infect its original host, and indeed, perhaps its original host had gone extinct. Variola had no reservoir of hosts in nature in which it could hide and continue to cycle if there was an attempt to eradicate it from people.

When people were infected with vaccinia, the mild cousin of smallpox, their immune systems became able to recognize variola and fight it off. If the human species could be widely infected with vaccinia and in just the right way, then vaccinia could, in effect, supplant variola in the human host. Driven out of its host by rival vaccinia, variola would have no niche left in the ecosystems of the earth.

This was, in fact, a daring plan, since no one could claim to understand the structure of natural ecosystems, especially in microbiology, or to have a clue as to whether the strategy would really work. Nature is full of surprises. Henderson wondered, for example, if smallpox just might have a little unnoticed reservoir somewhere in rodents. If so, that would destroy the dream of eradication, for humans have never been any good at getting rid of rodents. Henderson asked a virologist named James Steele if he thought any animal anywhere could harbor smallpox. Steele answered emphatically, “No. You will not find an animal reservoir.” Henderson couldn’t quite believe this, and for years the eradicators searched the world for a rodent, a bird, a lizard, a newt, anything with variola. They found no animal carrier of smallpox. Variola could not even replicate in primates, the closest relatives of humans. But then, in 1968, to the surprise of the eradicators, a previously unknown virus called monkeypox was discovered in a group of captive monkeys in Copenhagen, and the virus was traced back to the African rain forest, where to this day monkeypox infects humans. Monkeypox is an emerging virus that is making trans-species jumps into people in smoldering outbreaks in the rain forests of the Congo. Monkeypox may or may not one day take the natural place of smallpox vis-à-vis the human species.

Despite the evident fact that smallpox was restricted to a single host — people — many leading biologists believed that the eradication of any virus was a hopeless task. They held the opinion that it was impossible to separate a wild microbe from the ecological web it lived in. This view was expressed in 1965 by the evolutionary biologist René Dubos, in his book Man Adapting. “Even if genuine eradication of a pathogen or virus on a worldwide scale were theoretically and practically possible,” Dubos wrote, “the enormous effort required for reaching the goal would probably make the attempt economically and humanly unwise.” His belief was sensible and rational, it was held by most biologists of the time — and it was wrong.

When the program began, the World Health Assembly set a deadline of ten years for its completion. “President Kennedy had said we could land a man on the moon in ten years,” Henderson said, and so it should be possible to wipe out variola in the same amount of time. At first, the leaders of the Smallpox Eradication Program weren’t sure how to go about the job. They set a goal of vaccinating eighty percent of the population of countries that harbored smallpox, but that proved to be virtually impossible. They also developed the surveillance-and-ring-vaccination containment method. They tracked outbreaks of smallpox and swooped in and vaccinated everyone in a ring around the outbreak (as they would do in Meschede in 1970), which broke the chains of transmission and snuffed out the virus in that spot.

One of the lesser-known reasons for the eradication of smallpox was the desire of the doctors to eradicate vaccinia virus along with smallpox. Vaccinia gave a fairly high rate of complications, and it could make some people very sick or kill them. About one in a million people who got the vaccine during the Eradication died of it, and a larger number of people got very sick from it. The eradicators wanted to eliminate the need for vaccination, and the way to do that was to get rid of the disease. A study done by the WHO suggested that the world was losing one and a half billion dollars a year in economic damage caused by illness and complications from the vaccine.

William H. Foege is the doctor who pioneered ring vaccination. Foege, a tall, brilliant, deeply religious man, first used ring vaccination on a wide scale in Nigeria in November 1966, as an act of desperation, because he had run out of enough vaccine to immunize everybody in the area of a major outbreak. It worked surprisingly well, and as ring vaccinations proceeded and as outbreaks were choked off by rings of immune people, the eradicators began to believe that they really could wipe smallpox from the earth. The feeling was intoxicating to the eradicators. As it became clearer that the job could be done, D. A. Henderson became uncompromising as a leader. He inspired deep loyalty and affection, and he displayed the ruthlessness of a winning general. Henderson proved to be one of the geniuses in the history of management. There were normally only about eight people at headquarters, including secretaries, yet the program was a sprawling multinational operation (hundreds of thousands of health workers eventually were on salary, either part-time or full-time), and it operated all over the world, sometimes in countries engaged in civil war. His most important task was hiring the best people and giving them clear goals. Henderson’s way of firing people was to suggest to them that there were jobs that were less demanding. As he explained to me, “Unless you are in a position to be tough with people, you aren’t going to go forward.” Either you were marching along with D. A. Henderson or you were lying flat on your face and getting a massage with tank treads.

I once asked D. A. Henderson how he felt about his role in ending smallpox. “I’m one of many in the Eradication,” he answered. “There’s Frank Fenner, there’s Isao Arita, Bill Foege, Nicole Grasset, Zdenek Jezek, Jock Copeland, John Wickett — I could come up with fifty names. Let alone the thousands who worked in the infected countries.” Even so, Henderson was the Eisenhower of the Eradication.

John Wickett was a Canadian ski bum and computer programmer who turned up in Geneva in 1971, wanting to ski the Alps while earning a little money on the side working with computers. For some reason, D. A. Henderson hired him to eradicate smallpox. Henderson had an uncanny nose for human potential in the people he hired. Today, John Wickett is widely credited as having played a big role in the Eradication. “Eradicating smallpox was the most fun I ever had,” Wickett said to me. “It was fun because we actually did it and because D.A. was behind us. He could make the bureaucracy jump. When I had a problem with some bureaucrat, I’d say, ‘Do you want to talk to my boss?’ And I’d hear, ‘No…,’ and the problem would get fixed.”

Strange Trip

In the summer of 1970, a twenty-six-year-old medical doctor named Lawrence Brilliant finished his internship at Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. He had been diagnosed with a tumor of the parathyroid gland and was recovering from an operation, so he was not able to go on with his residency. He was living on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, where he was giving medical help to a group of Native Americans who had occupied Alcatraz in a protest. He ended up doing some interviews on television from the island, and a producer from Warner Bros. saw one of them and offered him a role in a movie. The movie was Medicine Ball Caravan, about hippies who go to England and end up at a Pink Floyd concert. Larry Brilliant played a doctor. (“It was such a shitty movie I don’t even expect my kids to watch it,” he says.) The movie also featured Wavy Gravy, one of the founders of the Hog Farm commune in Llano, New Mexico. The Hog Farm commune had recently become famous for running the food kitchen at the Woodstock festival, where they also provided security. Just before the festival, Wavy Gravy had explained to the press that security would be achieved through the use of cream pies and seltzer-filled squirt bottles.

Medicine Ball Caravan was shot first in San Francisco and then in England, and during the shooting Brilliant and Gravy became friends. (“Wavy Gravy is my best friend. I was just talking with him this morning,” Brilliant said to me not long ago. “I should explain that Wavy Gravy is two things: he is an activist clown and also an endangered flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.”) In England, Brilliant and his wife, Girija, and Wavy and his wife, Jahanara Gravy — she’s from Minnesota and is said to have been Bob Dylan’s girlfriend and perhaps even the model for the “Girl of the North Country”—pondered what to do next in life. A terrible cyclone had hit the delta of the Ganges River in the Bay of Bengal, in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the eye of the cyclone had passed over an island named Bhola. A hundred and fifty thousand people had drowned when a tidal surge had covered the entire island. The Brilliants and the Gravys hit on the idea of buying a bus and carrying food and medicines to the devastated islanders.

“Wavy and I and our wives — who, remarkably, are still our wives — drove to Kathmandu,” Brilliant said. They started with a rotten old British Leyland bus that they bought cheap in London. They painted it in psychedelic colors and filled the bus with medicine and food and a bunch of hippie friends. They bought a second bus in Germany and equipped it similarly, and the Brilliant-Gravy bus entourage made its way slowly through Turkey and Iran. The buses wandered around Afghanistan for months, and they made it over the Khyber Pass, following the same road that Peter Los and his friends had driven a little more than a year earlier in their Volkswagen bus. The Brilliant-Gravy expedition wound slowly through Pakistan and crossed into India. Civil war had broken out between East and West Pakistan — this was the independence war of Bangladesh — and the border of Bangladesh had been closed, so they couldn’t get their buses into the country. They turned northward into Nepal, and eventually the buses pulled into Kathmandu. “Wavy got sick and ended up going back to the U.S. weighing about eighty pounds,” Brilliant says. The Brilliants abandoned their bus in Kathmandu and went to New Delhi, India. It seems that the Brilliants were pondering what to do next in life, and nothing was coming along.

One day, the Brilliants were at the American Express office in New Delhi collecting their mail, when they encountered a man named Baba Ram Dass. Baba Ram Dass had recently been Professor Richard Alpert of Harvard University, but he and a colleague, Professor Timothy Leary, had been kicked out of Harvard for advocating the use of LSD. Baba Ram Dass spoke glowingly of a holy man named Neem Karoli Baba, who was the head of an ashram at the foot of the Himalayas in a remote district in northern India where the borders of China, India, and Nepal come together. Girija Brilliant was captivated by Baba Ram Dass’s talk of the holy man, and she wanted to meet him, though Larry was not interested. Girija insisted, and so they went. They ended up living in the ashram and becoming devotees of Neem Karoli Baba, who was a small, elderly man of indeterminate age. His only personal possession was a plaid blanket. He was a famous guru in India, and the people sometimes called him Blanket Baba. The Brilliants learned Hindi, meditated, and read the Bhagavad Gita. Meanwhile, Larry ran an informal clinic in the ashram, giving out medicines that he’d taken off the bus when they’d left it in Kathmandu. One day, he was outdoors at the ashram, singing Sanskrit songs with a group of students. Blanket Baba was sitting in front of the students, watching them sing. He fixed his eye on Brilliant and said to him in Hindi: “How much money do you have?”

“About five hundred dollars.”

“What about in America? How much money do you have there?”

“I got paranoid,” as Brilliant explains it, “because these Indian gurus have a reputation for ripping off their students.” He answered: “I have five hundred dollars in America, too.”

Blanket Baba got a sly grin and started chanting, in Hindi, “You have no money…. You are no doctor…. You have no money,” and he reached forward and tugged on Brilliant’s beard.

Brilliant didn’t know how to answer.

Neem Karoli Baba switched to English and kept on chanting. “You are no doctor… U N O doctor… U N O doctor.”

UNO can stand for United Nations Organization.

The guru was saying to his student (or so the student now thinks) that his duty and destiny — his dharma — was to become a doctor with the United Nations. “He made this funny gesture, looking up at the sky,” Brilliant recalled, “and he said in Hindi, ‘You are going to go into villages. You are going to eradicate smallpox. Because this is a terrible disease. But with God’s grace, smallpox will be unmulun.’” The guru used a formal old Sanskrit word that means “to be torn up by the roots.” Eradicated. The word unmulun comes from an Indo-European root that is at least ten thousand years old — the word is probably older than smallpox.

“So I said, ‘What do I do?’ And he said, ‘Go to New Delhi. Go to the office of the World Health Organization. Go get your job. Jao, jao, jao, jao.’ That means, ‘Go, go, go, go.’ ”

Brilliant packed a few things and left the ashram that night — the guru seemed to be in a rush to “unmulate” smallpox. The trip to New Delhi took seventeen hours by rickshaw and bus. When Brilliant walked into the office of the WHO, it was nearly empty. It had just been set up, and almost no one was working there. The government of India was then headed by Indira Gandhi, and she was skeptical of the Eradication program and had not yet approved it. The first person Brilliant met was the head of the office, Dr. Nicole Grasset. A French-Swiss woman who had been raised in South Africa, she was in her forties, raven haired, and dressed impeccably. Nicole Grasset has been described as a hurricane in a Dior dress.

“I was wearing a white dress and sandals,” Brilliant says. “I’m five feet nine, and my beard was something like five feet eleven, and my hair was in a ponytail down my back.” Grasset had no job to offer him, so Brilliant returned to the monastery and, having not slept in at least thirty-six hours, reported back to the guru.

“Did you get your job?”

“No.”

“Go back and get it.”

Brilliant was half dead on his feet, but the guru was looking as if he could become angry, and Brilliant did not want to have to deal with that. So he departed for New Delhi, another seventeen-hour trip, where Grasset was a little nonplussed to see the young man again so soon and looking so haggard. But nothing had changed.

“I went back and forth between New Delhi and the ashram at least a dozen times. All my teacher kept saying was, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your job. Smallpox will be unmulun, uprooted.” When at the ashram, Brilliant meditated. He would assume the lotus position, shut his eyes, and utter the sacred word Aummmmm.

Neem Karoli Baba would notice he was meditating, and he would walk up to Brilliant, yank an apple out from under his blanket, and throw it at Brilliant’s crotch. There would be a whack! and Brilliant’s Aumm would turn into Oww, God! My balls! and he would assume the “writhing lotus” position on the floor. The guru seemed to be hinting, Brilliant says now, that he needed to stand up on his feet and get back to the WHO in New Delhi, where his job awaited.

“On one of my trips, there was this tall guy sitting in the lobby of the WHO office. He looked up and said, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ ”

“I’ve come to work for the smallpox program,” Brilliant replied.

“There isn’t much of a program here.”

“My guru says it will be eradicated. Who are you?”

“I’m D. A. Henderson. I’m the head of the program.”

Brilliant was surprised to see the head of the global program sitting on a chair in the lobby doing nothing in particular. He later came to feel that Henderson was a little bit like the Lion in the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis. The Lion appears at key moments in the story, and he is a powerful presence who drives everything, but often you don’t see him or realize what a force he is.

Henderson, for his part, was a little put off by Brilliant’s white dress and his talk of a guru predicting a wipeout of smallpox. That day, Henderson wrote a note in the employment record, “Nice guy, sincere. Appears to have gone native.”

Back at the ashram, Blanket Baba kept throwing apples at Brilliant’s testicles. The situation was actually rather complicated. Indira Gandhi was herself a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, and she had visited him at the monastery, where she had bowed down to him and touched his feet and asked for his advice. Blanket Baba wanted smallpox pulled up by the roots, and he was annoyed at Mrs. Gandhi for resisting the efforts of the World Health Organization to get on with the job. In fact, Neem Karoli Baba was probably the most powerful and feared mystic among the leaders of India; many of them journeyed to touch his feet and seek advice when they assumed high office. He had advised Indira Gandhi in 1962, when China invaded Indian territory in the Himalayas not far from his ashram. He had told her not to go to war with China because, he said, the Chinese army would soon withdraw from India anyway. The Chinese did partially withdraw their army, and Blanket Baba got a reputation for being able to predict the future. Larry Brilliant’s trips to New Delhi were a small part of the guru’s continuing effort to help India realize its future. The uprooting of smallpox, in the view of the guru, was the duty of India and was the world’s destiny.

Brilliant thought he’d increase his chances of getting a job if he looked more Western, so every time he returned to New Delhi he trimmed off some of his beard and shortened his ponytail, and he began to replace articles of clothing. He ended up with medium-long hair and a short beard, and he was dressed in a checkered polyester suit with extra-wide lapels, a thick polyester tie, and a lime green Dacron shirt. He had made himself unnoticeable, for the seventies. By that time, Nicole Grasset had decided to hire him, and D. A. Henderson agreed that he might have some potential as an eradicator. He started as a typist.

Eventually, they sent Brilliant to a nearby district to handle smallpox outbreaks, where if he got into trouble they could pull him out quickly. He saw his first cases of variola major. “You can’t see smallpox and not be impressed,” he said. He began to organize vaccination campaigns in villages. He would go into a village where there was smallpox, rent an elephant, and ride through the village telling people in Hindi that they should get vaccinated. People didn’t want to be vaccinated. They felt that smallpox was an emanation of the goddess of smallpox, Shitala Ma, and that therefore the disease was part of the sacred order of the world; it was the dharma of people to have visitations from the disease. Brilliant haunted the temples of Shitala Ma, because inside those temples people with smallpox could be found praying and dying. He would look up the local leaders, take them to a temple, chant in Sanskrit with them, and then ask for their help in dealing with smallpox. Speaking in Hindi, he told people that his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taught that smallpox could be wiped out: “Worship the goddess and take the vaccine,” he told them.

Brilliant traveled all over India with Henderson and the other leaders of the Eradication, and they came to know one another intimately. “D.A. read nothing but war novels and books about Patton and other great generals in history,” Brilliant said. “Nicole Grasset read nothing except scientific things. Bill Foege was reading philosophy and Christian literature — he’s a devout Lutheran. I was reading mystical literature.” They ran a fleet of five hundred jeeps. They had a hundred and fifty thousand people working for the program, mostly on very small salaries. For a year and a half, at the peak of the campaign, every house in India was called on once a month by a health worker to see if anyone there had smallpox. There were a hundred and twenty million houses in India, and Brilliant estimates that the program made almost two billion house calls during that year and a half. The Lions Club and the Rotary Club International paid huge amounts of the cost of eradicating the virus in India. “Those business guys with their lapel buttons did this amazing thing,” Brilliant says.

After he helped to eradicate smallpox, Larry Brilliant did other things: he became one of Jerry Garcia’s physicians; he became the founder and co-owner of the Well, a famous early Internet operation; he became the CEO of SoftNet, a software company that reached three billion dollars in value on the stock market during the wild years of the Internet; he and Girija had three children; he became a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan; and, along with Wavy Gravy and Baba Ram Dass, he established a medical foundation called the Seva Foundation. Today, the Seva Foundation has cured two million people of blindness in India and Nepal. Along the way, Brilliant got to know Steven Jobs through their common admiration for Neem Karoli Baba. Jobs had gone to India to become a devotee of the guru, but by then Blanket Baba had gone incommunicado (he had died), so Jobs went off to study at another ashram. “Steve Jobs was a pretty nondescript guy in India, walking around barefoot with a shaved head,” Brilliant recalled. “Then he started Apple Computer. I said to him, ‘Steve, why are you wasting your time with this stuff? It isn’t going to go anywhere.’ ” Jobs later donated the first seed money to start the Seva Foundation.

“I’ve done a lot of things in life,” Brilliant said, “but I’ve never encountered people as smart, as hardworking, as kind, or as noble as the people who worked on smallpox. Everything about them — D. A. Henderson, Nicole Grasset, Zdenek Jezek, Steve Jones, Bill Foege, Isao Arita, the other leaders — everything about them as people was secondary to the work of eradicating smallpox. We hated smallpox.”

“D.A. once told me he thinks of smallpox as an entity,” I said.

“An entity, yes. To me, smallpox was a she, because of the goddess. You would think of her as having secret meetings with all her generals and staff, planning attacks.”

Attacks came out of nowhere. Early on, Brilliant was sent to deal with an outbreak centered in a train station in Bihar — the Tatanagar Station outbreak. He was twenty-eight years old, and Shitala Ma taught him a lesson he would never forget, for the Tatanagar outbreak blew up into the largest outbreak of smallpox in the world during the years of the Eradication, and it came as a total surprise. “I went to the train station, and I found a hundred people dying of smallpox,” Brilliant said. “I started crying. Women were handing me their babies. The babies were already dead. I heard rumors of birds carrying torn-off limbs of small children. Nothing in my life prepared me for that. I went to see the district medical officer and found him standing on a ladder in his office, alphabetizing his books. The look on his face was like a deer caught in headlights. ‘Don’t you know what’s going on?’ I said to him. ‘What can I do?’ he said.”

The virus was traveling inside people up and down the railroad line. As the people moved, so did variola. The train station was exporting cases all over India and, in fact, all over the world. Brilliant began to see what a worldwide transportation system could do to amplify the virus globally in a very short time. He centered his effort first on the train station, where he found dozens of people with smallpox climbing onto a departing train. He started yelling at the stationmaster to stop the train. He had no authority, but the train stopped. He went to the police and told them to throw up roadblocks and quarantine the city. He closed the bus station and stopped all the buses from running, and he closed the airport. “I was just an American kid yelling,” he says. Nicole Grasset stepped in with her authority and political connections, and she put Brilliant in charge of the operation. It took six months of desperate work, millions of dollars, and hundreds of staffers and health workers to put down the Tatanagar outbreak of variola major. “That outbreak in the Tatanagar railway station gave rise to over a thousand more outbreaks all over the world, even in Tokyo,” Brilliant said. “It is not enough to think you’ve cornered all but that last one case of smallpox, because that last one case can create those thousand outbreaks.”

Rahima

By 1974, smallpox was nearly gone from Asia. It had waned to a handful of cases in India and Nepal, but it was not yet finished in Bangladesh. Smallpox is a seasonal virus — it breaks out and spreads more easily when the weather is dry and cool, and it diminishes in moist, warm weather. People in Bangladesh called smallpox boshonto, which means “spring.” In south Asia, smallpox surged upward in the early spring, which is the dry season, before the summer monsoons. The eradicators mounted especially ruthless vaccination campaigns when the virus was at its ebb. In Bangladesh, they attacked the virus as hard as possible from September to November each year, when the virus seemed almost to rest — this was like killing a vampire in its sleep.

The autumn of 1974 saw a near total victory over variola in Bangladesh. In the first week of October, only twenty-four cases of smallpox were detected in the entire country. The WHO doctors could feel the end coming, and they predicted that Eradication would occur by December.

The summer monsoon of 1974 was fierce, causing the worst floods in fifty years to hit Bangladesh, especially in areas where there were still a few cases of smallpox. The floods set people in motion, and they settled in city slums called bustees. A few of them carried smallpox with them, and by December, variola major had begun to flicker unseen through the bustees of Dhaka, the capital.

In January 1975, the government of Bangladesh decided to clear out the bustees. Bulldozers flattened several in Dhaka, and the police ordered everyone to go back to their home villages. Around one hundred thousand people streamed out of Dhaka. Every person in Bangladesh lives within a two-week travel time of every other person in Bangladesh. The biological situation there is no different from what it was in Egypt or the river valleys of China thousands of years ago. Since the incubation period of smallpox is eleven to fourteen days, some of the people who came out of the bustees were incubating variola and didn’t know it, and they brought it back to their villages. In February 1975, with the coming of spring, variola major roared up in more than twelve hundred places across Bangladesh. It seemed to rise out of nowhere and everywhere, coalescing out of brushfires into a viral crown fire across the country.

The event was breathtaking in its suddenness, and it shook the eradicators to the core. The rings of containment began to fail across Bangladesh. The eradicators didn’t even know where to put rings, because variola seemed to be putting rings around them. They were seeing two hundred new outbreaks of smallpox every week. A failed ring vaccination was called a containment failure. During March 1975, there were nearly a thousand containment failures. It is said today that when the rings began failing in Bangladesh in the early spring of 1975, some of the leaders of the Eradication gave up hope. They felt that they had been wrong about variola after all, that ring containment wouldn’t work in the end, and that the evolutionary biologists might have been right in saying that no virus could be eradicated from nature.

The program leaders in Geneva threw everything they had into the outbreak. Eradicators streamed in from the Soviet Union, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Great Britain, France, Sweden, and other countries. Although he had no legal authority to do so, D. A. Henderson threatened to close down the ports in Bangladesh and cut off all shipping if the government didn’t mobilize its resources and get its act together. The government of Sweden poured resources into the campaign, and OXFAM, a private charity based in Great Britain, sent large amounts of money and people. Those who arrived to help received a little bit of training and were thrown into the field. The eradicators mounted ring vaccinations across Bangladesh, and they traced cases and contacts, trying to surround the life-form, and then the summer monsoons arrived, bringing wet weather. An act of nature helped to cool the viral fire, and by the end of the monsoons of 1975 smallpox was again waning. On September 15th, in Chittagong, along the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal, a boy was found with smallpox. He was the world’s last case of variola major.

They waited for two months to be sure, but there were no more reported cases. Finally, on November 14th, the program leaders in Geneva sent out a press release announcing that for the first time in human history the world was free of variola major.

The smallpox eradication program team leader in charge of Bangladesh was an American doctor named Stanley O. Foster. The day after the announcement, Stan Foster received three telexes. One came from the WHO:

Another came from the Centers for Disease Control:

There was also a third telex:

Bhola Island sits in the lower delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, where their waters merge with the Bay of Bengal. Bhola Island was the place toward which Wavy Gravy and Larry Brilliant had set out four years before in their painted buses, hoping to help someone.

Stan Foster grabbed a shortwave radio, threw a few things into a small knapsack, and left immediately for Bhola Island, traveling alone. He went to a pier in Dhaka and boarded a decrepit paddlewheel steamer called the Rocket, and took a passenger cabin on the deck. The Rocket was three hundred feet long, and it burned coal. It was a sidewheeler that had been built in 1924, and now it was a rusted hulk, jammed with humanity, chuffing and splashing down the Ganges toward the sea. Foster leaned on the rail as the boat made its way slowly along muddy channels, passing low shores lit by distant gleams of oil lamps. A waxing moon climbed across the stars, and he turned into his berth and slept. The air developed a hint of salt, and the Rocket entered an estuary, and shortly after sunrise the boat arrived at the port of Berisal, the end of the line, where Foster disembarked. He boarded a smallpox speedboat — an outboard motorboat run by the Eradication program — and it took him down across a vast brown bay, dotted with wooden sailing craft. He passed canoes and lateen rigs and catboats and square riggers, with cotton sails patched with cloths of bright colors; and he came to Bhola Island. It is thirty miles long, and it then contained a million people but nothing like a city. The speedboat stopped at a pier, and Foster disembarked. He was greeted by a team of local eradicators.

The island was a sandy mudflat where rice grew in profusion. There were palm trees and banana trees, and little houses of thatch, and lots of people everywhere. Foster and the local team got into a Land Rover and headed down a rutted road. The road got too muddy for the vehicle, so they parked and walked to Kuralia. They were always in the presence of people, working in the rice fields, crowding the paths. “You can’t be in private in that country,” Stan Foster said to me.

Local health workers led Foster and his team to a house belonging to Mr. Waziuddin Banu, a poor man who could neither read nor write. He owned no land but worked the land for others. Banu’s house had a thatched roof and walls made of woven fronds of palm.

It was dark inside Banu’s house. “I go in the house,” Foster said, “and I can’t see any cases of smallpox. Then I see this burlap sack in the corner, with a foot sticking out. It was a little kid covered with classical pox — a moderate case, not severe.” The victim was a little girl, three years old, named Rahima Banu. She was frightened of Foster, and had popped herself into the sack when he came in the door. Rahima had scabbed over, and most of her scabs had already fallen off. She had caught the virus from her uncle, a ten-year-old boy named Hares. Rahima, Hares, and a few other people with smallpox in the village had been diagnosed by an eight-year-old girl named Bilkisunnessa. She reported the cases to a local health worker, and she eventually collected a reward of sixty-two dollars from the WHO — a fortune for a girl on Bhola Island.

Stan Foster raised Dhaka on the radio and told his people that he had confirmed a case of smallpox. That night, an eradicator named Daniel Tarantola put together a large team in Dhaka, with twenty motorcycles and barrels of gasoline, and they set out for Bhola Island aboard the Rocket. The team organized a ring vaccination on the island, and they traced contacts, and vaccinated everybody who might have been exposed. In succeeding weeks, they searched all over the island for new cases, but they didn’t find any. Now variola major was really finished on earth. The hot type of smallpox had been uprooted.

When Stan Foster was with Rahima Banu, he took a bifurcated needle and used it to gently lift six scabs from her legs and feet. He tucked them into a plastic vial that had a red top. The removal of the little girl’s scabs would not have hurt much, because they were falling off anyway. Each of Rahima’s scabs was a brownish crust about the size of the worn nub of a pencil eraser.

When he returned to Dhaka, Foster gave the scabs to a virologist named Farida Huq, and she confirmed they were smallpox, and then she put the vial of Rahima’s scabs into a metal canister, along with a sheet of paper identifying the specimen. The canister went into a cardboard mailing tube and was sent to headquarters in Geneva. A secretary named Celia Sands handled all the smallpox samples — largely scabs in tubes — that were sent in from the field. She opened the packages on a table in the work area in the middle of the SEP cubicles, took out the red-topped plastic tubes full of scabs, and entered the information about them into a log. She was getting smallpox boosters once a year. (“Now, when you think about how we handled the specimens, it’s so different from the way it’s done today,” she said to me. “Nothing ever happened, though.”) After she had logged and inspected them, she sent the samples on to one of two smallpox repositories, either to the CDC or to the Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow. These two places were known as WHO Collaborating Centres. Sands alternated sending samples to one or the other, so that the Americans and the Russians would end up with roughly equal amounts of scabs.

The smallpox at the Moscow Institute was cared for by a fluffy-haired, somewhat stout pox virologist named Svetlana Marennikova. She was highly regarded among pox experts, who found her scientific ideas provocative and solid.

Rahima’s six scabs ended up at the CDC, where around Christmas of 1975, a pox virologist named Joseph Esposito transferred them with tweezers into a little plastic vial, smaller than a person’s pinky. With an extrafine Sanford Sharpie pen, he wrote RAHIMA on the vial, added some other identifying data, and placed the vial in the CDC’s reference freezer containing smallpox strains.

Courtesy of Stanley O. Foster, Center for Public Health Preparedness and Research, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, from The Eradication of Smallpox from Bangladesh, by A. K. Joarder, D. Tarantola, and J. Tulloch (New Delhi: WHO South East Asia Regional Office, 1980).

The strain of variola major that came from those scabs is known today as the Rahima. All six of her scabs are said to have been used up in scientific research, but the Rahima exists, frozen in small plastic vials full of translucent white ice, which looks like frozen skim milk. The milkiness is caused by vast numbers of particles of the Rahima strain, which have been grown in virus cultures and are now suspended in the ice. The Rahima sleeps in a freezer and will never die, unless and until the human race decides to end its relationship with variola, and puts the Rahima and all other smallpox strains to death.

The weak strain of smallpox, variola minor or alastrim, continued to run in chains of transmission around the Horn of Africa. The eradicators focused their attention there. On October 27th, 1977, a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin broke out with the world’s final natural case of variola. They vaccinated fifty-seven thousand people around him, and the final ring tightened, and the life cycle of the virus stopped.

A Slit Throat

In the late summer of 1978, less than a year after Ali Maow Maalin contracted the last naturally occurring case of smallpox, Janet Parker, a medical photographer in Birmingham, England, became sick. Confined at home, she developed a blistering rash all over her body. Her doctor believed she was having a bad reaction to a drug. Parker lived alone, and she became too ill to care for herself. Her seventy-seven-year-old father came to her house, helped Janet into his car, and drove her home to stay with him and her mother. Parker grew sicker, and her parents took her to the hospital, where doctors were stunned to discover that she had smallpox.

Mr. Parker came down with a fever twelve days after he had driven Janet home in his car, and as he was breaking with variola he died of a heart attack. Janet died of kidney failure in early September. She had been vaccinated for smallpox as an adult, twelve years before she died, but her immunity had worn off. Janet’s mother broke with smallpox and survived; she was the last person on earth who is known, publicly, to have been infected with variola. In Somalia, WHO doctors described the deaths in the Parker family to Ali Maow Maalin, the hospital cook. They say he burst into tears. “I’ll no longer be the last case of smallpox!” he said to them.

Janet Parker had worked in a darkroom on the third floor of a building at the medical school of the University of Birmingham. One floor below her darkroom, and down the hall some distance, a smallpox researcher named Henry Bedson was doing experiments with variola. Bedson was a thin, gentle, youthful-looking man who was internationally known and had established personal friendships with many of the eradicators. A team of investigators from the WHO was never able to pin down exactly how Janet Parker became infected, but they believed that particles of the virus had floated out of Bedson’s smallpox room, drifted through a room used for animal research, had then been sucked into the building’s air-vent system, had traveled upward one floor, passed through a room known as the telephone room, passed through two more small rooms, and finally gotten inside Parker’s darkroom, and had lodged in her throat or lungs.

On September 2nd, as Janet Parker lay desperately ill, Henry Bedson was discovered lying unconscious in the potting shed behind his house. He had slit his throat with a pair of scissors, and much of the blood in his body had drained out. He died five days later, despite transfusions.

When Bedson slit his throat, the eradicators woke up to the fact that although the disease was gone, the virus wasn’t, and they stepped up their efforts to gain control of all the known stocks of smallpox in the world. They felt that as human immunity to the virus waned year by year, the potential for laboratory accidents was growing.

In 1975, at least seventy-five laboratories had frozen stocks of smallpox virus. Poxviruses, including smallpox, can survive for many decades in a freezer without damage or loss of infective potency — probably for at least fifty years. A freezer with a few vials of smallpox in it could become a biological time bomb. In 1976, a year before the last natural cases of smallpox occurred, the WHO formally asked all laboratories holding smallpox to either destroy their stocks or send them to one of the two Collaborating Centres. The WHO had no legal power to compel anyone to give up their smallpox, but D. A. Henderson and the others were tough and persistent. One by one, the laboratories that were keeping smallpox sent their samples to America and Russia or destroyed them or said they had destroyed them.

Vault

Today, variola exists officially in only two repositories, the Collaborating Centres. One of the repositories is the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the CDC in Atlanta. The other repository is in Russia. When scientists handle variola, international rules require them to wear full space suits and to be inside a sealed Biosafety Level 4 containment zone. The WHO forbids any laboratory from possessing more than ten percent of the DNA of variola, and no one is officially allowed to do experiments with smallpox DNA. Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species.

The CDC’s smallpox collection sits inside a liquid-nitrogen freezer. The freezer is a stainless-steel cylinder, about chest high, with a circular lid and a digital temperature display. At the bottom of the freezer there is a pool of liquid nitrogen, three inches deep, which maintains the air inside the freezer at a steady temperature of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. There are about four hundred and fifty different strains of smallpox inside the freezer. The samples are frozen in the little plastic vials called cryovials. The cryovials stand upright in small white boxes made of cardboard or plastic, which are divided with grid inserts, like cartons for storing wine. The boxes are stacked in metal racks, and they sit suspended over the pool of liquid nitrogen, bathed in cold fumes. The entire volume of the CDC’s smallpox is about the size of a beach ball.

Officials at the CDC do not comment on such matters as where exactly the smallpox is stored or what the freezer looks like. The freezer is on wheels, and it can be moved around, and it may be moved from time to time, as in a shell game. It is covered with huge chains that are festooned with padlocks the size of grapefruits. The chains are connected to anchors or bolts in the floor or the walls, so that the freezer can’t be moved unless the chains are unlocked or cut. I have been told that the smallpox freezer can often be found sitting inside a steel chamber that is said to resemble a bank vault. The variola vault is enlaced with alarms, and it may be disguised. You might look straight at the vault and not know that your eyes are resting on the place where half the world’s known smallpox is hidden. There may be more than one variola vault. There may be a decoy vault. If you opened the decoy vault, you could find a freezer full of vials labeled SMALLPOX that held nothing but vaccine — a raised middle finger from the CDC to a feckless smallpox thief. The variola vault could be disguised to look like a janitor’s closet, but if you opened the door in search of a mop, you could find yourself face-to-face with a locked vault, having set off screaming alarms. If the variola alarms go off, armed federal marshals will show up fast.

The smallpox at the CDC’s repository may be kept in mirrored form: there may be two freezers, designated the A freezer and the B freezer. The A and B freezers (if they exist, which is unclear) would each contain identical sets of vials — mirrored smallpox — so that if one freezer malfunctioned and its contents were ruined, the variola mirror would remain. No one will talk about mirrored smallpox today, but twenty years ago the smallpox was kept in mirrored form at the CDC. Whether that arrangement holds true today is presumably not known to anyone but a handful of top people at the CDC and to some of the security staff. People at the CDC do not discuss details of the storage, and many of them may not know of the existence of the vault. They don’t know, and they don’t ask.