Whiteout by Ken Follett Page B

quickly wiped it away.

11 A.M.
    â€œVIRUSES kill thousands of people every day,” Stanley Oxenford said. “About every ten years, an epidemic of influenza kills around twenty-five thousand people in the United Kingdom. In 1918, flu caused more deaths than the whole of World War One. In the year 2002, three million people died of AIDS, which is caused by human immunodeficiency virus. And viruses are involved in ten percent of cancers.”
    Toni listened intently, sitting beside him in the Great Hall, under the varnished timbers of the mock-medieval roof. He sounded calm and controlled, but she knew him well enough to recognize the barely audible tremor of strain in his voice. He had been shocked and dismayed by Laurence Mahoney’s threat, and the fear that he might lose everything was only just concealed by his unruffled facade.
    She watched the faces of the assembled reporters. Would they hear what he was saying and understand the importance of his work? She knew journalists. Some were intelligent, many stupid. A few believed in telling the truth; the majority just wrote the most sensational story they could get away with. She felt indignant that they could hold in their hands the fate of a man such as Stanley. Yet the power of the tabloids was a brutal fact of modern life. If enough of these hacks chose to portray Stanley as a mad scientist in a Frankenstein castle, the Americans might be sufficiently embarrassed to pull the finance.
    That would be a tragedy—not just for Stanley, but for the world. True, someone else could finish the testing program for the antiviral drug, but a ruined and bankrupt Stanley would invent no more miracle cures. Toni thought angrily that she would like to slap the dumb faces of the journalists and say, “Wake up—this is about your future, too!”
    â€œViruses are a fact of life, but we don’t have to accept that fact passively,” Stanley went on. Toni admired the way he spoke. His voice was measured but relaxed. He used this tone when explaining things to younger colleagues. His speech sounded more like a conversation. “Scientists can defeat viruses. Before AIDS, the great killer was smallpox—until a scientist called Edward Jenner invented vaccination in 1796. Now smallpox has disappeared from human society. Similarly, polio has been eliminated in large areas of our world. In time, we will defeat influenza, and AIDS, and even cancer—and it will be done by scientists like us, working in laboratories such as this.”
    A woman put up a hand and called out. “What are you working on here—exactly?”
    Toni said, “Would you mind identifying yourself?”
    â€œEdie McAllan, science correspondent, Scotland on Sunday. ”
    Cynthia Creighton, sitting on the other side of Stanley, made a note.
    Stanley said, “We have developed an antiviral drug. That’s rare. There are plenty of antibiotic drugs, which kill bacteria, but few that attack viruses.”
    A man said, “What’s the difference?” He added, “Clive Brown, Daily Record. ”
    The Record was a tabloid. Toni was pleased with the direction the questions were taking. She wanted the press to concentrate on real science. The more they understood, the less likely they were to print damaging rubbish.
    Stanley said, “Bacteria, or germs, are tiny creatures that can be seen with a normal microscope. Each of us is host to billions of them. Many are useful, helping us digest food, for example, or dispose of dead skin cells. A few cause illness, and some of those can be treated withantibiotics. Viruses are smaller and simpler than bacteria. You need an electron microscope to see them. A virus cannot reproduce itself—instead, it hijacks the biochemical machinery of a living cell and forces the cell to produce copies of the virus. No known virus is useful to humans. And we have few medicines to combat them. That’s why a new antiviral