Richard Preston
Richard Preston
Richard Prestonis a New Yorker writer and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction. Whether journalistic or fictional, his writings are based on extensive background research and interviews...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 August 1954
CountryUnited States of America
eighty giant human particle piece resemble size thousand trunk twelve wide
An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.
closer north plant stand titans valleys whales
The redwoods you can see in Muir Woods are nothing like the redwood titans that stand in the rainforest valleys of the North Coast, closer to Oregon. These are the dreadnoughts of trees, the blue whales of the plant kingdom.
constantly filling human moves moving seems themselves thousands time
Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling redwood space over redwood time, over thousands of years.
area burst copies enormous limbs propensity surface
Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the redwood.
appear flourish relationship salt shy sight tend valleys
Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don't like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be stroked but are shy to the touch.
amazon deep five living material sheer tropical weight
Redwood rainforest has five to 10 times the biomass - that's the sheer weight of living material - of, say, deep tropical rainforest in the Amazon basin.
carry ecosystems escaped expanding flourish frequent human life organisms people planet rapid
Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.
across annual creatures goes great migrations mostly north occur though
The annual flight of the dragonflies goes mostly unnoticed, though it is one of the great migrations of flying creatures that occur across North America.
fact nature ourselves understand
I think we sometimes give ourselves a little too much credit as humans, as being able to control and understand nature, when in fact we do neither.
areas basic biological california creating entire massive medical population remove third ticking time urban
We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb.
adjust best frequently hosts interest moves natural selection time
When a parasite moves to a new habitat, it can find new hosts through a process called the trans-species jump. Often, the new host has no resistance; it and the parasite haven't had time to adjust to each other through natural selection (it is frequently not in the best interest of a parasite to kill its host quickly).
body change copies good half help human jumps mistakes problem result roughly time
The problem with Ebola is that it makes mistakes while it copies itself. The mistakes are actually good for Ebola because they help Ebola change, and as a result of this, as it jumps from one human body to the next, roughly half the time, it's got a mutation.
relatively though woods
Though the redwoods in Muir Woods are hauntingly beautiful trees, they are relatively small and not very tall, at least for redwoods.
bats turns
It turns out, from what I hear, that roasted fruit bats are delicious.