Richard Preston

American journalist and author of The Hot Zone, the harrowing non-fiction account of the Ebola virus that made biosafety a mainstream concern.

Richard Preston is an American journalist and non-fiction author who transformed public awareness of biosafety threats with The Hot Zone, published in 1994. The book recounts a real-life 1989 outbreak of a strain of Ebola virus in a research facility in Reston, Virginia — just outside Washington, D.C. — and the race to contain it before it could spread to the human population. Preston’s thriller-style narrative approach turned a scientific and public health story into compulsive, terrifying reading.

The Hot Zone spent years on the New York Times bestseller list and is frequently cited as one of the most frightening books ever written. It did more to bring biosafety and pandemic risk to public attention than almost any other work of journalism. Bill Gates called it essential reading. The book’s vividly physical descriptions of hemorrhagic fever and its accounts of the scientists and military personnel who put themselves at risk to study and contain deadly pathogens have a visceral power that science journalism rarely achieves.

Preston followed The Hot Zone with The Cobra Event (a novel about bioterrorism), The Demon in the Freezer (about the smallpox virus), and The Wild Trees (about old-growth coast redwoods). He is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. His ability to combine rigorous research with genuinely gripping narrative makes him one of the most important science writers of his generation, and The Hot Zone remains required reading for anyone interested in pandemic preparedness and the hidden dangers at the frontier of biology.