Orent, Wendy

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Orent, Wendy

PERSONAL: Born in NC. Education: University of Michigan, Ph.D. (anthropology).

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Freelance science journalist and anthropologist.

WRITINGS:

(With Igor V. Domaradskij) Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine, Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY), 2003.

Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease, Free Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Also contributor to American Prospect, Natural History, Discover, Los Angeles Times, and New Republic.

SIDELIGHTS: Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributor Steve Weinberg has described Wendy Orent as a "free-lance science journalist with a doctorate in anthropology and a fascination with diseases that kill lots of people quickly." That interest has led Orent to explore the world of biological weapons and the scientists who create them. One of these scientists, Igor V. Domaradskij, tells his story in Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine, which he coauthored with Orent.

Growing up in Stalinist Russia, Domaradskij decided early on to join the Communist Party and to let it guide his life. Beginning as a legitimate epidemiologist, he was eventually assigned to developing defenses against biological weapons and then to developing the weapons themselves. Nearly eighty years old at the time the book was written, Domaradskij recounts his disturbing career to Orent, providing valuable insights into a dark subject.

Among other weapons, Domaradskij and his colleagues developed a drug-resistant strain of the black plague, and in Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease Orent describes humanity's experiences with plagues throughout history. Plague reached its most virulent form in the infamous Black Death, which wiped out some forty percent of Europe's population in the fourteenth century. After charting the history of plague pandemics, Orent speculates on the dangers of current stockpiles. While many American scientists argue that stockpiled strains are probably impotent by now, "the knowledge of former bioweapons scientists is very much on the market," according to Booklist reviewer Ray Olson. A Kirkus Reviews contributor found that "Orent's message is chilling, and her stories of previous epidemics make palpable the enormity of the threat." Madeline Drexler, writing in the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer, stated: "Finely crafted and always engaging, Plague, will appeal to anyone interested in medicine, public health or history."

Orent told CA: "I really don't have a 'fascination with diseases that kill a lot of people quickly' (as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution states); rather I have a fascination for figuring things out—and diseases happen to be what I've focused on for the past eight years. I became interested in biological weapons in 1997, when I happened to read an article in Newsweek about the smallpox virus. The article stated that U.S. intelligence sources believed that the smallpox virus was in the hands of several rogue governments, possibly including that of Iraq. This perturbed me. I wondered how the World Health Organization could make plans to destroy the smallpox virus when an unknown quantity of it could be floating around the world. I decided to find out. At that point, I had my Ph.D. in anthropology, but I had left academia to raise my two children. I was also working part-time as a book reviewer and occasional essayist. But I knew I had to write this story. I talked my way into the Center for Disease Control and met with one of their leading smallpox experts. And I talked the Sciences [staff] … into letting me cover the story for them, a story which, the more I dug, grew bigger and bigger, and more and more frightening.

"Eventually I learned that smallpox had been weaponized in Russia and was indisputably no longer restricted to the legal 'reference stocks' kept at Vektor Laboratories in Siberia. I also learned that it was in the hands of the North Koreans, though no smoking gun was ever uncovered for Iraq. I became involved in the fight to preserve the legal stores of the smallpox virus from the charade of destruction, and wrote a number of articles, for the Los Angeles Times, Sciences, and the American Prospect, which figured in the debate. I also began to research the entire Soviet bioweapons program, which eventually led me to Igor Domaradskij, a chief designer of the entire Soviet bioweapons system. He helped me understand a great deal about the system. We became friends, and I decided to help him convert his short memoir into a longer, English-language, approachable book. As Domaradskij is widely recognized as one of the world's greatest living plague experts, my friendship and collaboration with him eventually led me to an interest in plague.

"My research on plague began as a study of plague as a Soviet bioweapon, a story I sold to Discover magazine. But while researching that story, I began to learn about plague's entanglement with the human species, and eventually to see that a riddle lies at the heart of that long history. Why is a germ which once wiped out a third of Europe and Asia now so sluggish? Have people changed, or has the germ evolved in some way? My training in evolutionary biology as an undergraduate and a graduate student at the University of Michigan led me to think that, during the Black Death, the germ had indeed changed as it passed from person to person. But how? And why?

"I tracked the footprints of the Black Death from Central Asia, where it began, to Europe—a trail I realized had to follow the track of the Mongol armies spreading out from Central Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Why did the plague start in Central Asia?

"I learned that the oldest focus … of plague in nature is found among the marmots of Central Asia, where dangerous plague strains can still be found, as the Soviet bioweaponeers knew well. These strains are very different from the plague germs familiar to American scientists, which do not spread from person to person and do not produce epidemics. I began to see that in plague the host strain determines, at least at the outset, how explosive any particular introduction of the plague germ into humans will be. If someone catches plague from a prairie dog in Colorado, he may die of it, but he won't pass it on. But if someone gets plague from a Central Asia marmot, which has a propensity to zoom straight for the lungs, that strain may be jump-started to spread from person to person, and can cause an epidemic of pneumonic plague. The graves of the earliest victims of the Black Death we know of have been found in a marmot plague focus … area of Central Asia.

"Putting all that together, I realized that the Black Death must have been a marmot strain, probably introduced by a hunter which was passed from person to person (this has happened many times in the twentieth century; one such outbreak, in 1910, killed 60,000 people.)

"Only person-to-person transmission can possibly account for the speed with which the Black Death spread. Rat-and rat-flea-borne plague moves at a much slower pace. Eventually the marmot strains got into rats and changed … during the Renaissance, you never hear about blood-spitting, the hallmark of pneumonic plague. And the pattern, the footprint, of the disease as it moved across Europe during the Renaissance was very different from the Black Death.

"There were lots of other fascinating things to try and figure out—like why the first huge pandemic—the Justinian Plague of 542-560—was so different from the Black Death (it came from rats and not marmots), or why the plague eventually vanished from Europe (the invention of soap, according to two French researchers whose work has been almost forgotten).

"Working out a likely scenario for the Black Death was, to me, the most absorbing part of writing this book. It was also frightening. It isn't so pleasant to realize that the Soviets weaponized strains of marmot plague … and included antibiotic resistance in those strains. No one thinks those weaponized stocks survive. But the knowledge to make them certainly does. And if I'm right, and marmot plague was the cause of the Black Death, then the Soviet research becomes still more disturbing."