students 17 and 18 and 19 year-old. >> host: peter blair henri day of new york university's stern school of business and author of this book, a turnaround. you are watching booktv on c-span2. >> today it is my pleasure

to introduce our speaker richard preston during his undergraduate work and got his ph.d. in english from princeton university where he studied 19 century nonfiction writing and the author of nine books on a variety of topics including infectious disease and a children's story and the author of many nonfiction pieces including a piece just last week entitled the old wars preston published the hot zone with the accidental outbreak and a colony of research monkeys and virginia in the '80s. the hot zone sold millions of copies and terrified millions of readers. for example, novelist stephen king said the first chapter is one of the most horrifying things i have ever read and then it gets worse. [laughter] i am also sure "the hot

zone" inspired many readers to consider and pursue careers in epidemiology and public health with a fascination from what we know today. the most recent massive outbreak occurred for the first time in west africa put speeleven back on the best-seller list 20 years after the publication as a revolutionary biologist have a particular fascination for the insidious ingenuity of infectious diseases and the dynamics of the epidemic infections. and so is the pleasure to bring this element to discuss it today i am happy we have the opportunity and the foresight to bring richard preston here to talk to us today in this timely lecture to talk about ebola

breakout from the hot summer. please join me to welcome richard preston. [applause] >> thank you. it is a pleasure and a delight to be here even with the context of ebola. i want to tell you a story because it is not just a virus but a human problem. i also want to let you know, i will try to keep my remarks brief so we have time for q&a after words. as rick pointed out my expertise is in english literature. and there are surely people in this room that no more about molecular biology than i do and it would be fine to

get into a of a discussion about what i will be presenting and i will try to answer whatever questions you may have. maybe there are people in the room that is answer better. ebola has been breaking down from reportorial africa it could never established a firm foothold in the human species. it lives somewhere in editorial africa in some unknown creature, possibly a bad it -- of bator parasite such as the fly or a ticket or a mite that lives of the body that is the actual carrier of the bolo we do not know it is not known. butted 1976 in the small

upcountry role hospital that was then zaire it came to the notice of doctors for the first time. they did not know at the time that all they knew it was exceedingly infectious disease presumably a virus. it got into the staff of the hospital one of the victims was a belgian man who worked there and here we see her just prior to 76 on a the river we being gabbai this is the last known photograph of her. the virus got into the medical staff and we don't know who patient zero was or

where it came from. but it raced through the staff and killed a number of people. b.c. hear the gentleman with a beard and glasses is a priest and when the sister lay dying he gave her last rites. she was weeping at the time and in some cases you could have pinpoint hemorrhages of the rims of the eyelids apparently she had blood on the eyelids and it reaches to the tears running down her face. the father began weeping while giving her the last rites into account is handkerchief and wiped the tears from her face then wipe the tears from his own face and then dead 14 days later. at first international health authorities had no idea what was going on with

yambuku but it was extremely alarming. virus experts began to get teams together to go and. one of the first people the first medical doctor from the outside world to reach yambuku was a belgian physician. a young doctor who had never been in the field before and this was the first major outbreak. he had a good deal of difficulty reaching yambuku. when he finally got there, he arrived at night and got into the building to find essentially most of the medical staff was dead. the patients that were their word gone. they were frightened. he walked into the obstetrical ward in the waiting room and the ebola viruses to it and -- devastating for pregnant

women it will induce a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage accompanied by profuse average for the infant dies and the mother typically dies as well. so when the doctor went into the obstetrics ward he found pools of blood all over the floor and surgical sponges saturated with blood all over the place and though our was worse. and we are talking very, very rudimentary hospital with what we know of as effective modern tools and techniques. he realized very quickly these areas were presumably lee did with an unknown virus. ebola at that time did not have a name. nobody knew anything about its characteristics and it was assumed to be a

virus, and nobody had any idea how it was transmitted person to person but it was obvious it cost averaging and had an extremely high case of a fatality rate. the reported case of the early outbreak is around 90%. nine out of 10 were said to die but one wonders if that is at all accurate. i don't think there was careful to epidemiology done. but the doctor went to bet in a small bundle of next to the hospital that night and reported later the first i was called a night of quiet and silence because people were dead but then at 5:00 in the morning a woman was brought in. she was in childbirth and in

terrible distress. shaking with fever of very high fever and averaging profusely from her birth canal. he was the only doctor on the scene that could make decisions to do anything. the obstetrical ward was clearly not the place for this woman so they set the table on the porch in front he had flashlights for elimination. the woman lying on the table with several nurses who had stayed despite the obvious danger to themselves. but by this point the remaining staff understood their lives were in jeopardy by simply being your the patients. the doctor examined the woman and came to a couple of determinations and first she was engraved distress.

at the end of her rope and was likely to die if nothing was done. the baby was a breach, the woman was hemorrhaging and in order to save their lives he would have to perform a procedure however a cesarean section was completely out of the question. she could not be brought in to the obstetrical ward or the o.r. and he had no anesthetic. none were available and just the light of the flashlight. he had rubber gloves and a cloth came on. -- down. he made a decision as a doctor to perform of very old 19th century medical procedure it is an alternative way to deliver a baby. he took a scalpel, he

separated the bones of the pubic bone. if you feel your pelvis right down in front the bones joined together somewhere below your navel it is a hard area but if you press hard you can feel the two front bones are joined by a layer of very tough cartilage. there is a joint there. while she did not have an aesthetic he split her pelvis through the cartilage and then had nurses opened the woman's lakes and her whole pelvis came all been like this and he brought the baby out. it was covered with blood, blood was everywhere. and the woman was in distress. then the baby -- the doctor

discovered the baby wasn't breathing a rest and without thinking, he tore off his surgical mask and placed the baby's face up to his and rescued the baby's life he breathed air into his lungs and save to the baby. then he pulled back. and said the realized what he had done his face and eyes and mouth and nose were covered with the babies and the mother's blood their hands were covered and the nurses were in shock. once centcom doctor, i do you realize what you have done? he centcom i do now. i tell the story because this is what the doctors have been facing today. is us situation if you are a trained physician you do

what you have to do and don't think about your own personal safety. the doctor later reported this was the only time in my a medical career i was not just afraid that lived real terror. he survived. as it turned out the woman's fever was from malaria. she did not have people up. he saved the life of the child and the mother who both lived completely normal human existences in zaire. but since then the ebola virus has made 23 appearances on the planet. 20 were outbreaks transmitted from one person to another. the total cumulative number of deaths is less than 2,000 of bricks tend to be small and burnout quickly.

doctors after awhile got a sense of complacency. there was a general consensus in the medical community that ebola virus was not much of the threat and easily controlled. but nature has a way to surprise scientific people. if you make the assumption based on sufficient data nature has a way of completely surprising new. the recent outbreak began it seems on december 6, 2013 when its year-old boy died of what we know is ebola virus. a type of ebola that was different from all others that appeared then i will talk about the genetics of the virus.

but this particular ebola began to move and left the village jumping from person to person setting off a chain seven factions when making a trance species jump from the human species to its host when it tends to turn the human species into a new post if you can talk about the goal of the virus it is tricky because it'll have anything like that consciousness but what it does have is biological sophistication and is set genetically to be opportunistic. the goal of the virus is to set up endless chain of infection those litter of

broken and never end and in that since the virus that makes the jump like hiv makes itself immortal in a new human species, the host. something like 7,000 years ago the smallpox virus did this. it is thought to have once lived it eroded to that lived on grain. and about 7,000 years ago the first time in the history of our species that we were gathered a large numbers in the river valleys in the middle east and china where you have conglomerations of 200,000 people within the 14 day travel time of one another. the incubation period is 14

days. epidemiologist have done the computer simulation concluded that smallpox may take the jumps into the human species italy with a concentrated populations of the river valleys with the grain silos with rhoda population it is to come tomorrow and the human species and it maintained its immortality to declare e. eradicate -- eradicated in 1979 by the who and mal lee lives and laboratories and a frozen state. so it is in an earlier phase of an attempt to make himself -- itself a moral and human species.

we have some images. this is from zaire their pretty much like what we see today. the guys that discovered it but what is ebola in the way? but that virus particle looks like a strand of spaghetti and only has seven structural proteins better in this spaghetti shape their these enzymes that have a replication process. but at this center of a container of protein is a strand of rna which contains

that genetic code of the virus. one recent sample of the virus they counted 18,979 letters of rna which is a very small genome with the standards of life. the human genome is 3 billion letters of dna. there are kids that i have up at tender 12 billion letters of the dna in there genome it seems some orchids are more complicated than human beings. ebola virus is considered to be a level for agent with no vaccine and no cure so in the laboratory you need to be wearing high degree of bio protective gear to work with concentrated quantities of the virus. these are photographs. these are elephants in one

of them hiding places of the cousin of ebola. when a particle was inside a cell it will replicate like bad. that replication cycle peaks 80 hours after it enters the cell and and then turning that into a factory to make more virus particles. then it gets a plump shape and bend the particles begin growing. to have thousands and thousands of particles the

virus takes its sweet time. they tend to last a lot longer in it dash very quickly and to have the ability to keep that host cell alive longer. >> in west africa the net effect on human as more and more cells are infected to spew out thousands of particles and with a droplet of blood that the end of the

ebola infection the blood is loaded with these particles nobody understands how the person dies of the bowl of fire is. but clinically we know that capillary walls lose integrity and blood and blood plasma will seep out of the blood vessels. and then it starts clotting. and then it throws tiny clots everywhere in the body and then the patient can begin to have coverages to have multiple organ failure

to go into shock. it is hard to point to any particular cause of death with the massive loss of blood pressure. at the end of the replication phased large enough to make a spot that covers one-fifth of your fifth pinkie finger canal in that droplet there could be 100 million through 1 billion particles of ebola virus. it is infectious with direct contact with blood. and another jury experiments suggest that single particle introduced can cause a fatal infection.

>> as the ebola outbreak widens hospitals became overwhelmed with patients. and wine was up a hospital in sierra leone. for many years they had a laboratory for investigating the virus which is another african average added is considered to be a viable level safety for agent there is no vaccine for reliable care. a number of american researchers and assistant professor at harvard university has been working

for years. here we have them where they do genetic sequencing of all kinds of organisms. they are among the subjects of my recent new yorker article about the ebola outbreak. with a singer and the songwriter and then to put the fourth album on hold due involvement with the a break. the machine began working with physicians that was

running the research unit and was the chief physician at the hospital. and early on the people at m.i.t. and harvard decided it would be a great idea to get genomes sequencing. and then to find out how it is mutating because the genetic code is in the rna these types of viruses are known to make errors when they copy themselves. it is a lot like mokes who would copy the manuscripts by hand as they copied and copied it introduced small changes in words and letters and as time goes by the text changes.

and as ebola moves from one person to the next with these chains of infection are these generations are subjected to ferocious natural selection in which each person who is infected may have multiple genomes in their body by the time the infection peeks out so the virus may mutate inside the body of a single individual. if we know it is mutating exactly how is it changing? and what could happen to it? there is a general concern that the longer this outbreak goes on the longer the virus is exposed to the human body and is replicating going from one person to the next

statistically there is a chance of the mutation to make the virus far more contagious in humans. so in this lab began working on trying to get blood samples with patients with ebola. to where they could be sequenced and read. one of the key players on the left over here the head nurse at the hospital was a small person and a complete dynamo who always wore a starched white uniform except when it biohazard gear.

but in may 23rd of a woman arrived in is having a miscarriage and hemorrhaging. and dr. collins suspected she may have ebola. they tested her blood to find and she was positive. then the doctor and his colleagues ended up collecting blood from discarded blood tubes that would be incinerated in a the biohazard incinerator. the reason it is considered to be highly unethical to take samples from a patient in a clinical setting for research. so what they had to do was gather the rna from medical

waste they've got the samples over to the institute i know if you are familiar with genomes sequencing i didn't know anything about it. but steven, the genome guy he is the talented chef offered a chance to compete on the bronco show top shelf. but turned it down it to went to africa to do research on the monkey pox which is the cousin of smallpox. let these people tend to be

extremely precise with their hands was called in control dealing with complex recipes what microbiology is all about. so initially lifted 14 samples of human blood they had a technique where they took the blood plasma with a lot of destroyed red blood cells if you take a sample from the patient it will look like a mess it will look like blood that is very thick like it is dead. the to this horrible looking blood and purified it. day -- and they add purified

vodka, alcohol to this to extract the rna it comes out in the solution. they end up with a droplet called a library. and in this case it contained trillions of fragments of rna. it was about 300 letters long, shattered rna from many genomes of the bowl of. and each individual fragment was tagged with the bar code of the dna that would link that fragment to one of 14 patients individuals who were infected with ebola virus in this liquid droplets it was the size of a raindrop.

stephen ticket to this sequencing platform, and digital make sequencing machines each one cost $1 million and there are 54 in the sequencing core at the institute. and the staff in this place they take that drop that is called a library think of that information of genetic code. the way it is described to me that each piece of rna could be thought of as a book with a cover with the isdn number. however this would represent an ungodly number from the libraries of congress this is many, many libraries but

they are an organized and have never been read nobody knows what is between the cover and there is a huge pile not wind up in proper order. so in the sequencing corer the technician took one-tenth of the raindrop come in the amount of liquid like good job -- a drop of moisture that hits your face when you walk through fog to put that on the slide that is put into the sequencing machine and lasers shine on it well the liquid compound is washed over the flow sell over 24 hours they get the sequence of more than 1 billion of these pieces of rna now they have a huge amount of data in the

computer that is put into the giant supercomputers were all the pieces of rna are assembled because their overlapping with bits of code that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. 24 hours later they had 12 completed finished genome sequences of people love virus. 12 varieties of the virus. it mutated in each case they could tell because of the way the mutations were running naked tell who gave it to whom and reconstructed the chain of infection of the 14 individuals in sierra leone and could show that the virus originated with one human being presumably the little boy who could have been infected with one particle. the entire outbreak in

theory could have started with one particle of ebola or just a few. they also found out that in about half the cases moving from one human being to the next there was significant mutation in the code causing a slight but measurable change of a protein that has a direct effect on the ability to fight to ebola because all drugs and vaccines and tests are all keyed into the genetic code of the virus and if that is changing then it can become less visible. the test will not elicit the virus the vaccine may not work as effectively that is in development. that meanwhile, this was

going on, but sebetti was terrified for dr. kanye who was committed to his patients e. began working in the ebola ward it was distressing and horrible to work can as they filled up with people. some of the staff got too frightened to come to work until finally dr. kann was working alone in protective garb that is like a portable space suit. an american epidemiologist went to see how dr. con was doing and was shocked and dismayed to see what was happening there was

one, there were three wards complicity stuffed with patients the largest was a big plastic tent erected by a relief agency inside the tent there were 30 beds of the caller read said it has a plastic mattress and whole in the center the patient lies on the mattress and defecates into a bucket because people with cholera have uncontrollable watery diarrhea with ebola they also can have that which has a lot of blood in it to. and when joseph looked in the window he saw a doctor, with wonder said it was a nightmare. everything that could come out of the human body was all over the floor and over the protective garb of doctor, and. and direct contact it could

be infectious as one single particle many people who became infected with ebola could not remember making any mistakes at all they thought the gear was good and decontamination process was precise but they got it anyway. id any event doctor, did not come to work. they found out he was keeping himself at home he isolated himself was feeling ill they noted a few days previously that dr. khan was taking off a long to sit in a plastic chair to smoke a cigarette and he never smoked in the boards but he was now and later they thought he knew he was coming down with people and wanted to protect the staff by keeping away from them.

when they said somebody to his house they took of blood sample he was positive. at that point dr. khan decided he needed to get away because his presence as the patient would be too demoralizing for the remaining staff. he climbed into ambulance that to a gym for five hours over the terrible roads to another clinic where he became sicker and sicker in the isolation in the ebola ward. but there was a freezer there. there was one experimental drug never tested in humans called z map and his illness

was considered the international crisis and they called for help and the experts were aware that z map was their 25 seats away from dr. khan. they debated for three days whether to give him the drug or not the considerations were very difficult. it was experimental. he was an african doctor. and national hero. he was given the drug and he died it then he was an african doctor killed by an experimental drug and ministered by doctors from the developed world. it might not have any effect but if he died it would be blamed on the drive but on the other hand, it could save his life but then if he got the drug then why can anybody else?

it went back and forth meanwhile dr. khan did not seem to be that's it like he was hanging in there. there was hope he had a good chance to come through naturally. but with ebola patients can look like they do all right but then suddenly what is called the crash where all of a sudden you're in a startling decline and it could happen in a matter of hours you lose blood pressure in multiple organ failure and die very fast and in the and that is what happened to dr. khan the z-map ended up with the two people working for christian medical organization they both survived they split the

dose of z-map and dr. brantley in particular particular, he seemed to be at the point of death when the drug was administered to him and he turned around in a period of three or four hours july 31st this year and when researching the article i discover that at the very moment that dr. brantley was being saved by the z-map drug when the burial detail finished burying dr. khan in sierra leone. >> i am thinking of though words of dr. close to died a couple of years ago the father of the actress glenn close and expert of the

ebola virus the head of the hospital in contrast the condo 1976 and was evolved firsthand with that outbreak and said once if there are lessons to be learned it is about people doing their duty and doctors doing what has to be done right now without a lot of heroics. have you ever been petrified with fear where you have no hope of control over your fate? when the die is cast this year goes away and you do what you have to do. you get to work. this is what dr. khan did and i am sure in times to come they will have statues

to him for those that died. but what we have here is medical people who sacrificed their lives and patience and those for science itself and when the sebetti paper was published five of the authors were deceased all who had died with the ebola outbreak and one of them was dr. khan. i have more but we're running short on time. i thought it would be wonderful to open the room to questions. . .

in africa, including an american, stephen nacht for this. my question is i gather one or two people have survived in america unknowing american medicine as they do, they have all the bells and whistles. they've got a lot of

transfusions. however, one of the people of the photographs, and "the new york times," i got african-american survivor, a survivor of a bullet, do some people because they are unique, whatever they've got genetically, do some people just make it through the type they have? are all the bells and whistles absolutely necessary? >> is is a really good question and i don't think at this point we really know the answer fully. we don't actually know why some people survive and action and some people do not. it seems pretty evident that there is a genetic component that some people just have a lucky roll of the dice in their genes. >> there were people who write tons of contact with hiv never got it. also written in "the new york times." no one ever really knew why i

never got an answer as to what made them have no problem with it. >> i can tell you one thing. if you want or survive an infection with ebola, this comes from an unpublished oral data depardieu said betty told me about. you need to be a period if you are in fact did with ebola, here are the statistics for this outbreak. if you are a soulless 35 to 40, the fatality rates goes up to 44%. you're already too old. if you are age 43 to 45, the case fatality rate is around 93%. if you are your 50s or 60s come he might as as well kiss yourself goodbye. the case fatality rate is probably closed to 90%. john people are surviving ebola.

yes. richard tiered >> think so much for your talk. you started off by talking about how you're going to talk about the human aspect, the human story and if you can speak for a moment about the human animal stories behind diseases like ebola. of course these diseases are created equal. they are very different in their effects and how they are transmitted, but they do share this human animal leap. i am thinking about culturally a question about the culture of these diseases in a particular ebola rather than a science fair diseases like sars, avian flu in the way we talk about those diseases and human animal connection there. we tend to think a lot more about the wrong things they are

eating into the world. we don't hear as much, paula. some of the reporting we see we don't talk about it as much. i'm curious if you thought at all about the difference in the human animal story they are. that's really interesting. actually that is correct. we don't talk very much about the human animal connection with ebola except that there are these still eat meat. we don't know very much about the connection to the animal world. we know what is coming out of an animal hosts, but in these outbreaks in all of them, the early patients are dead. for the epidemiologist comes around to find out what were you

doing, dgp about? fruit bats are supposed to taste delicious. they are supposed to be not bad at all. did you reason that? did you kill about? dicicco something else? where was the fact? what kind of about? or was it a rodent? what was that? the epidemiologist simply run into darkness because all of the early cases were dead and they can't talk anymore. they can't tell you what they were doing. i do want to address this a little bit, which is the great confusion -- there's been a huge amount of confusion in the public discourse about what airport means and whether ebola virus could mutate, you know, get into the air interns who in a drum in a stream that will wipe us all out. so eric lander, the head of the

road institute put it very succinctly to me. a bowl of virus is mutating. the longer the virus goes on, the more chances the virus has too developed a mutation that would really be dangerous for all of us. but it doesn't necessarily have to go into the air in order to travel more affect only from one human being to the next. the way eric lander put it waistcoat zebras learn how to fly? he said that's really not the right question to ask me at the right question to ask is can zebras learn how to run three times faster? a bullet can certainly do that. there are unpublished results showing that in some ebola patients of this type of ebola that we are seen, they are getting 10 times the number of virus particles in their bloodstream thing has been seen

typically in previous outbreaks. so the virus is going to tremendous perfusion in human bodies. this doesn't necessarily make you sicker, but it might make you more infectious because you are producing not many more particles coming out of your body. that could be a favorable adaptation of a favorable mutation. we just don't know at this point. in terms of airborne, there are really two kinds of airport with viruses. there is what is called droplet infection, which is where -- here we are. this is somebody sneezing and you can see droplets coming out of this guy's mouth. these are liquid droplet and mayor of the size that causes most of them to fall to the ground in a distance of about a meter, maybe two meters uttermost. so when you're around a bowl of patients bowl of patience come and they could be throwing liquid droplets into the care.

40% of the patients in this outbreak are costing. coughing is apparently major feature of the ebola virus disease we see in west africa today. people could be causing particles of ebola, small droplets of blood, but they are not going to go that far through the air. the other way that a virus can move is illegal measles virus moves. here's measles. this is what it looks like it measles is part of the marbella virus family. in this case, the virus can travel through the air in dried form. the virus can survive drying and it can essentially end up in small, dried dust particles that travel 150 yards from one person to the next person and get indicted deep into the lungs for the virus can activate and attach itself to lung tissue and replicate a new host.

so with true aerosol transmission might this, and this is the measles of viruses are far more dangerous because it's almost impossible in and out rake to trace the cases and contacts because you can have somebody 100 yards away who gives it to somebody else. you know, that is something that really a lancelot of people. the question about the animal kingdom. there are these viruses living in animals and they have the potential of moving into humans and they have done so in the recent past. yes. >> i was wondering if a professional writer struggling with the story from the scientific effects. should the general public, what do you think has been the role of american media in conveying the story of ebola?

has been effective or beneficial and could you describe this relationship quite >> the media coverage in the united states has been terrific. "the new york times" and "washington post" in particular have been a good god covering the outbreak. you know, they've had reporters on the ground, really detailing the human suffering, getting into the questions of science. the print media has done a wonderful job. i never know about the video media. it's always hired. the video media tends to depend for the united states. they don't have a lot of time to really get into things. in some instances they seem good reporting. cnn has an excellent job in terms of video media. the general media coverage of the out rate has been quite good.

very. yeah, yes. >> thank you for your talk. i'm wondering if he could talk about your research that says when you are gathering information about this. as you go to these hospitals in west africa? package get the information? >> this is a great question. i'm a writer and i love talking about writing. i'm supposed to be an area expert in ebola, but i'm an expert in writing. i've been teaching classes here at deal. it's been a lot of fun. and this particular instance, this is nonfiction writing. this is what we call a narrative nonfiction. i typically spend huge amounts of time with my subjects. i get to know them as individuals. very often people that i've written about over the years become lifelong friends. as one of those things that happens. when you spend a lot of time so

somebody, taking a lot of notes, you end up learning a whole lot more about the human being the human being that never ends up in print. all the skeletons in the classic come out. you find all about whatever medical problems they have. typically i never write about a person's medical issues must as part of the story itself. i get the kids have their voice in my head until i can here them immensely. i hear my subjects talk to me. and a number of my books, for some reason i go back to the same nursing nonfiction. so i think i may be one of the only nonfiction writers i know of who is a repertory cast. so peter darlin, for example, the guy who lived of all of virus in the hot the later said whiffing a bola virus from a

flask is the second dumbest thing he did. the second was to tell richard preston about it. but peter is indeed a good friend of mine today in east come back again and again. he was a major care there indeed been in the freezer. he was a source for two of my books without being in the foreground. i now work on another book in pa will be back in that one as well. i know this is a long way of answering your question. so it is a matter of taking us in getting to know my subjects. in this case i did not go to west africa. i did all of my reporting at m.i.t. and also in nih laboratory in maryland and i never went to africa. i will be going to africa for the course of the research on this book. i never met kumar khan and i never saw the cat in the hospital. what i did do was i got to know members of the family.

he has brothers and sisters in the united states and it's an extra area family. i got a real feel for this guy by talking to the people who loved him. so that is how i did this particular piece of research. at about half an answer or not. >> i was wondering if you could comment on the ability of the world to be prepared for this outbreak and whether you think that its failure was primarily a scientific want to underestimating the virus or maybe an anthropological one to underestimating the conditions of which it has spread. >> well, i think you know, there's been a lot of finger pointing over this outbreak in a lot of discussion of the failure of the world health organization to really get on top of it and the failure of all kinds of

medical organizations to understand what was happening here. i see it a little bit differently. you know, it would be -- i would love to be able to get smoke with you and say well, and i wrote "the hot zone" and i saw coming a long time ago. i'm sorry to tell you i'm not able to do that in any honest way. i think this outbreak really surprise you. it's always easy in retrospect. now we know. did we park our brains at the door? of course you think about these crowded urban environments and you put ebola into a crowded slum in west africa or for that matter if it gets into dhaka in bangladesh are ready when south asia for hospitals are well known for not having adequate infection control, ebola could very easily leave west africa.

i see this is not so much a failure on the part of the public health committee, but as a natural disaster that simply overwhelmed us. i see it in the same terms as let's say saddam he or an earthquake. like the japanese tsunami. takeback, for example. japanese have been prepared a long time for tsunami is, but they just didn't think of everything they did encode that it was really going to be an a lot of people died in the japanese tsunami. they could've done a better, but in the end what we are seeing i think is essentially the of the powerlessness of the human species to really control its destiny in the ecosystems of the planet that, you know, in the end of that was the end if it wasn't a bola, it's going to be something else and personally i

think ebola is by no means the most dangerous virus on the planet. anyway, what is happening right now is an excellent wake-up call for very worst things that could have been. i see the outbreak regardless of where it goes. it could still go global. we have epidemiologists in this room. one guide has just come back from liberia. love your thoughts on this. he thinks the epidemic curve may already be turning over. another words, the number of cases may be flattening out. we don't know what the future holds. it's very unpredictable. i think what we can think about if it is a kind of case study. mother nature has given is an interesting case study of what can happen with an emerging infectious disease when it comes out of some little host in nature that we didn't tank about. i don't know that's really an answer to your question. >> so, let me ask the corollary

of that question. knowing what we know and then you say a bola is now not just in one urban area, but in several, why do you think, it's been there for months, why do you think we are seeing a flurry case number is what we are quick >> i'm sorry, could you refresh us with your name. >> ryan boyko. >> ryan boyko, thank you. you just got back from liberia, right quick >> yes. >> thank you for your work. >> banks. [applause] well, i heard one epidemiologists told me that he sees in this ebola outbreak he sees what he calls the fireworks displays. he said we don't really understand what ebola is doing,

but it goes off like a burst of fireworks in someplace like mockery, capital of guinea and then everything goes dark and all of a sudden there's all of a sudden there's no unenviable words. weeks earlier there were hundred people and other spy. it is like a firework display of things are dark and a splash than before and he doesn't understand what is actually happening with ebola outbreak. you have insight into this? he told me after things looked like they were under control, all of a sudden it's been a bigger flash and there's more cases than ever before in that city. do have a sense of what's happening? >> every few gases. >> last year. >> for one, behavior changes is a huge factor. every single building in

monrovia, even outside of the nicer areas, even in the slums, they have handwashing stations, water with a better detergents or bleach and other measures like that and there's no handshaking, none of that going on. not that this behavior is necessarily in particular are responsible for preventing too many infections, but i think it is a testament to the fact that if i was on everybody's mind. and at this point, i don't think that there's a lot of people there who don't believe that it's real but don't believe it is transmitted a bodily fluids are those kinds of things. i think regardless of what your customs are, if you see people dying in front of you or your neighbors have seen people dying in front of them, that has a big

impact on you and it changes your behavior. i think there's a lot of behavior change that just happen. even in america with four cases you see, you know, terror and some crazy people being hauled out of school because they came from rwanda or whatever. so i think that's one reason. another reason is you see -- it is the series of very small local outbreaks is what it really is. in any household or a block, you know, there are people who are more likely to be the caregivers and those are the people most likely to be infected. after those people are in fact it and dying, you naturally in that area, you know, you are running out of people who have large numbers of contacts with very sick individuals.

so i think that is another part of that. >> i have a question for you. [inaudible] >> the question is what do they do with the bodies? >> so what they do -- actually, this is another reason in monrovia, they got a lot better about responding to bodies. but even when i was there, you would see people gathered around any team coming to remove the body. but basically you have people dressed in full ppe that column. there is a phone number you can call to report a body. people will come in an ambulance and spray chlorine all over the body, all around it, put even

one body bag, sprayed the affected body back, but you're an ambulance, traded outside of town and they set up an incinerator outside of time, a crematory and so everybody who dies in monrovia, with the exception possibly of children of members of parliament or something, especially everybody who dies in the movie and now has that have been in a go and they are cremated at night. they throw all the bodies in there together. this itself there was a lot of tension about this. this in the numbers don't get any ashes back. there is nothing that they get back. said that in itself is a distant sensitive to telling somebody that your family member has

died. but anybody can call whatever. but this is how infection control versus anthropological concerns if you want to call it. >> grief. thank you very much. >> please join me in thanking richard. [applause] and please join us for a reception straight back in this hallway right now. good to see you there. [inaudible conversations]

>> so let's go back to the naf kleman because it's another obscure story in computing were not fully and accurate critique of women, mostly not majors have small midwestern college is, bring them out to pennsylvania and decide they are going to be assigned the task of programming this computer. why are they simultaneously a philips skier and yet play such an important role at the key moment? >> are at a pair of store was happening during war. it was originally done mainly to calculate missile to reject ariz for artillery tables. as the worst ending and by 1946

they realized they had to do other things such as john underlayment arrives and says i wanted to know if this bomb concept will actually work. so they do the explosion and inflation for the hydrogen bomb and women are the ones who understand how to program it by unplugging and replugging cables and turning off switches. they get now the ties the boys with their toys that they were in charge at midnight, the the day that they unveil final in 1946, it's valentine's day. "the new york times" is fair. dignitaries from all dignitaries from although very they're finally to show off they have this machine. jeanne jennings spartak, then jeanne jennings do the program. they have to stay up all night because they got one thing wrong. they finally figured out, it works perfectly for the

demonstration. everybody goes to this wonderful candlelit dinner, black tie, pages at "the new york times" that the women are invited. it's valentine's day and they take a bus back to their apartments, feeling bad they didn't even get invited to the dinner. when you wonder about women in technology, you have to say we all have several models. you've got to put these people back in the history so everybody feels included in this revolution and they have role models.

the >> next, leon panetta talks about his career in public service from a ranging from his years as a u.s. representative from california this most recent post of secretary of defense. this is about an hour and 15. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good evening. thank you for coming. i am liz hottel, director of the politics & prose bookstore. and i too began by thanking six van eyck, the cultural partnership where the throes of another dynamic season of events together. please check out our website for more information.

we also host events on host events from our bookstore at connecticut avenue in almost every night of the year we offer a wide range of cultural trips, literary classes and book clubs. please stop by and visit us. tonight at six van eyck, with the honor of welcoming leann panetta. mr. panetta has a long and storied career of public service. in 1976, he was elected to the u.s. congress where he represented color for his 16th congressional district for 16 years. he acted as president clintondirector of the united states office of management and budget and then as his chief of staff from 1994 to 1997. he founded the leon panetta policies than in 2009 became director of the central intelligence agency. from 2011 to 2013 is served as the 23rd united states secretary of defense under president obama. tonight mr. panetta comes to

mess with a new memoir, "worthy fights." and income experiments with the legacy and focus on his time as secretary of defense. his unwavering sense of morality and the leaf in the exhausting work of public service radiates off every page. as david ignatius writes in the washington post, panetta comes across this book is a man is never sure a man has never shirked a fight he thought was right. tonight he will be in conversation with mike allen of the chief white house correspondent from "politico" and the man behind "politico"'s playbook. mike is at "the new york times" famously petain, the man the white house wakes up to. is written for publications including time, "washington post" and "new york times." as bob woodward declared connie don't have to do anything else, just read mike allen. they will be in what promises to be a lively conversation, roughly 40 minutes after which we invite you to join in with