《埃博拉浩劫》,20年前的预言

When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began to escalate a few months ago, the writer Richard Preston was working on a children's fantasy novel. He dropped that and called David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. "I said, ‘I've got to get back to Ebola,' " Mr. Preston said. "I've got to cover this."

几个月前，当埃博拉病毒在西非肆虐日甚之际，作家理查德·普雷斯顿(Richard Preston)正在创作一本儿童奇幻小说。他停下来，给《纽约客》杂志的主编戴维·雷姆尼克(David Remnick)打去电话。“我跟他说，‘我得回过头去弄埃博拉，'”普雷斯顿说道。“我要去写报道。”

Mr. Preston first incited public fears about Ebola 20 years ago with "The Hot Zone," his thrillerlike narrative that details the virus's origins and scientists' struggle to understand and stop it. The book, which has sold 3.5 million copies, could perhaps be classified as dystopian nonfiction. Stephen King called it "one of the most horrifying things I've ever read." With fears about Ebola rising once more, "The Hot Zone" has been in high demand: Mr. Preston's publisher has released 150,000 more copies in recent months, and the book has reappeared on the New York Times best-seller list and on Sunday ranked No. 23 on Amazon.

20年前，普雷斯顿的《埃博拉浩劫》一书引发了公众对这种病毒的恐慌；他用类似惊悚小说的写法，描绘了这种病毒的起源，以及科学家是如何奋力了解、阻止这种病毒的传播。这本已经售出350万册的图书，或许可以划入反乌托邦非虚构类。史蒂芬·金(Stephen King)曾说，这本书“是我读过的最吓人的书之一”。伴随埃博拉再次爆发的恐惧，《埃博拉浩劫》的销量也随之大增，普雷斯顿的出版商在最近几个月加印了15万册，该书再次登上了纽约时报畅销书榜，周日的时候，它在亚马逊的销量榜上排在第23位。

This week, The New Yorker is publishing Mr. Preston's latest reporting on the virus, a dispatch about the efforts to sequence its genome intertwined with a narrative about a doctor's doomed effort to treat the disease on the front lines. In a telephone interview, Mr. Preston spoke about his decades-long quest to understand the virus. These are excerpts from the conversation.

本周，《纽约客》将发表普雷斯顿对于埃博拉病毒的最新报道，该文描绘了科学家如何给这种病毒的基因组进行测序，还穿插了一名大夫在一线如何治疗这种疾病却注定失败的故事。在电话采访中，普雷斯顿谈到自己数十年来一直想要了解这种病毒。以下是访谈内容的摘录。

Q. It has been more than two decades since you started writing about Ebola. How has your understanding of the virus evolved?

问：自从你开始写埃博拉病毒以来，二十多年过去了，你对这种病毒的理解有了哪些变化？

A. It's changed a great deal. We know a lot more about Ebola in the intervening 20 years. Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out. With what we know now about the genetic code of the virus, Ebola does not travel through the air in airborne form and is very unlikely to mutate that way. Another thing that's been learned about Ebola is the mutation rate. The virus is continually mutating as it's moving through the human population. It's testing out its new environment. One of the biggest concerns is that all of our drugs and tests and vaccines for Ebola need to be adjusted. We can adjust the tests, but we need to watch how the virus is doing. We have a whole bunch of new tools that we never had in the 1990s. We now have the ability to use genetic sequencing machines to read the code of the virus again and again. This is like making a video of the virus moving in real time. We now have our eyes on the enemy.

答：变化挺大的。在过去的20年里，我们对埃博拉的了解增加了不少。一开始的时候，很多人担心埃博拉会出现变异，成为经空气传播的“安德洛墨达菌株”，会把我们人类全给灭了。随着对这种病毒的基因序列的了解，我们现在知道埃博拉不会通过空气传播，而且几乎不可能出现这种变异。我们对埃博拉的另一个了解，就是它的突变率。这种病毒在人类的传播过程中，不停地突变。这是在对新环境做调适。人们最大的一个担忧是，我们针对埃博拉的所有药、试剂和疫苗，都得做相应调整。调整试剂倒不难，但是我们需要知道病毒在做怎样的变化。我们现在拥有的许多新工具，是上世纪九十年代完全没有的。我们现在有能力使用基因测序仪来反复读取这种病毒的遗传密码。这就像是拿着摄像机对着正在运动的病毒，我们现在置敌人与眼皮之下。

Q. Some of your descriptions of the virus and its symptoms in "The Hot Zone" have been called inaccurate and hyperbolic. Are you planning to release an updated version of "The Hot Zone" with information related to the current crisis?

问：《埃博拉浩劫》中对于这种病毒及症状的描述，有人认为是不准确的，有夸张在里面。你有没有计划把与当下危机相关的信息加入进去，推出修订版的《埃博拉浩劫》？

A. Yes, I am dying to update the book. I want to make the clinical picture of the virus more clear and accurate. In the original "Hot Zone," I have a description of a nurse weeping tears of blood. That almost certainly didn't happen. When a person has Ebola, the eyes can turn brilliant red from blood vessels leaking and blood oozing out of the eyelid. That's horrifying, but it's not someone with tears of blood running down their face. I want to fix that. The other thing that's happening with Ebola today is there have been more outbreaks, and virologists are constructing a tree showing how they are related. The names of the viruses and the relationships have changed, and I want to get that into "The Hot Zone." Finally, I'm going to put in an introduction in which I place the story of "The Hot Zone" in today's context.

答：的确，我很想对这本书做修正。我想让这种病毒的临床描绘更加的清晰、准确。在老版的《埃博拉浩劫》中，我写道一个护士流血泪的情节。几乎可以肯定，这是不会发生的事情。在感染了埃博拉病毒后，眼睛会因为血管破裂而变得鲜红，而且会有血从眼睑渗出来。这非常可怕，但不会出现血泪在脸上滑落的情形。我想对这段进行修正。另外一个与埃博拉有关的、目前正在发生的事情是，出现了更多的爆发病例，病毒学家正在构筑树状家谱图，把它们之间的关联呈现出来。许多病毒的名字以及之间的关系都发生了改变，我都想放进《埃博拉浩劫》。最后一点，我将把《埃博拉浩劫》的故事放在今天这个大背景下，写一篇序言。

Q. There are reports that "The Hot Zone" is being developed into a TV series for Fox. Will it be based on the book and the earlier outbreak you covered, or the current crisis?

问：有许多报道说，福克斯要把《埃博拉浩劫》改编成一部电视连续剧。它是以这本书以及你早些时候对该病毒爆发的报道为基础，还是当下的危机为基础？

A. I feel pretty confident that they're going to want to move the story into the current situation. Fox bought the rights to the book way back when, and there was this attempt by Fox to make a movie out of "The Hot Zone," and it tended tragically in a Hollywood disaster involving Robert Redford and Jodie Foster and Ridley Scott. But the rights have been sitting at Fox ever since. The original screenwriter for the Fox movie and the producer Lynda Obst teamed up and have proposed a TV series to Fox.

答：我很肯定它们是想把这个故事放到当下的情境中。福克斯很早就买下了这本书的改编权，然后想把它拍成电影，最后却不幸变成了一场好莱坞的灾难，把罗伯特·雷德福(Robert Redford)、朱迪·福斯特(Jodie Foster)和雷德利·斯科特(Ridley Scott)都给牵扯进来。但改编权一直在福克斯的手上。那部电影原来的编剧和制片人琳达·奥布斯特(Lynda Obst)搭起班子，提出给福克斯拍一部连续剧。

Q. Will the show be fictional or based on your reporting?

问：那这部剧集究竟是虚构的，还是以你的报道为蓝本？

A. It's been the impulse in Hollywood to fictionalize it. I keep telling them: "Don't do that. Don't turn it into another predictable Hollywood drama."

答：好莱坞总有瞎编的冲动。我一直跟他们讲，“不要这样。不要把它变成又一部老套的好莱坞式的戏。”

Q. You wrote about the threat of Ebola decades ago, and the fear sort of faded. Is it surreal to see it reappear so dramatically and so close to home?

问：二十年前，你就写到了埃博拉的威胁，那种恐惧后来算是消退了。但现在看到它引人注目地重新爆发，而且距离我们如此之近，是不是有一种不真实的离奇感？

A. It's wrenching. We're getting a feel for the magnitude of human suffering and fear, and it's awful. I was very surprised when this huge outbreak began and seemed to get bigger and bigger. I'd turned away from writing about Ebola and wrote about the world's largest living things, the Redwood trees, and most recently, I've been writing a fantasy novel for kids that I've been working on for years.

答：还蛮痛苦的。我们对人类的苦难和恐惧有了新的认识，真是骇人。这次大规模爆发，令我很惊讶，而且它的范围似乎越来越大。我已经很长时间没有写过埃博拉病毒了，之前在写世界上最大的活物——红杉树，最近的写作情况是，我一直在写一本儿童奇幻小说，写了好几年。

Q. Besides its extreme fatality rate, what's so terrifying about Ebola?

问：除了极高的死亡率，还有什么令埃博拉如此可怕？

A. Here's what's terrifying about Ebola. Ebola is invisible. It's a monster without a face. With the science that we have now, we can perceive Ebola as being not one thing but as a swarm, and the swarm is moving through the human population and expanding its numbers. It has the qualities of a monster. It's the most important character in "The Hot Zone." It's the nonhuman other that all human beings are contending with in many different ways.

答：那我就来说说埃博拉病毒的可怕之处吧。这种病毒是肉眼看不见的。它是一个无脸怪兽。运用我们现有的科学技术，我们可以把埃博拉当成一串而非单一的病毒，它在人群中移动，同时数量越变越多。它具有怪兽的特征。在《埃博拉浩劫》里最重要的角色就是它。它是全体人类通过各种方式与之搏斗的非人生物。

Q. Your brother is the techno thriller and horror novelist Douglas Preston. Do the two of you share writing tips and read drafts of each other's work?

问：科技惊悚和恐怖小说作家道格拉斯·普雷斯顿(Douglas Preston)是你的弟弟，你们俩会交流写作经验，阅读彼此作品的草稿吗？

A. We often talk shop. Doug's books, quite a few of them have grisly aspects. People will ask us: "I've read your books and read your brother's books and they're so gruesome. Did you have a terrible childhood?" No, we had a happy childhood. It comes from storytelling around the dinner table. We all just got into the habit of telling weird and interesting stories.

答：我们经常有互动。道格拉斯的作品中，有相当多的书情节都挺吓人的。大家爱问我们：“我读了你的书，也读了你哥哥（弟弟）的书，看得让人毛骨悚然。你们的童年是不是很不幸？”不是这样的，我俩的童年很幸福。我们爱在吃饭的时候坐在餐桌旁讲故事。我们都有说各种离奇、有趣故事的习惯。