Summer Reading Book- Panic in Level 4

The book I’m reading is called Panic in Level 4 by Richard Preston. It is a science nonfiction book with a lot of interesting stories. There are a total of six stories in this book. They are the Mountain of Pi, a Death in the Forest, the Blood Kiss, the Human Kabbalah, the Lost Unicorn, and the Self-Cannibals. The Mountain of Pi starts by telling us about these two great mathematicians. They are Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky and David Volfovich Chudnovsky. Gregory and David are Russian mathematicians who were trying to build a super computer and find the number pi. They both are different person but they are connected as one. They won’t accept any job without each other. The next story is about a parasite killing most of the hemlock trees in the united state. The parasite is called adelgid which sucks the nutrients out of the trees. This tells us that the hemlock tree is not the normal host of adelgid. If it is the normal host, then the hemlock trees should have a defensive system against them and they won’t kill the hemlock trees so fast. A parasite would not try to kill its host because they would need to get a new one every time they killed it. The Blood Kiss is about a virus called Ebola. Ebola kills everyone who has contact with the victim. First, it tells how G.M. goes to the forest and cuts down the trees to make charcoal. He lives in a town called Kikwit where there is no running water, sewage system, telephone, newspaper, and no radio station. One day G.M. got sick and this spread to most of the town. The first sign of Ebola was red eye. Then blood would ooze from the eye and their urine becomes red. After that they would die. Most of the people from Kikwit died and the virus stopped when the last doctor in the hospital die. People stop going to the hospital and the virus stopped spreading. Scientist still didn’t find out who was the normal host of Ebola. They tested on insects and animal in the forest but wasn’t able to find anything. The Human Kabbalah is about the Human Genome Project. It tells how the human DNA is molecule about a meter long and made up of nucleotide. The project tries to create a smart card which contains all your DNA information. If you lose it, people may clone you. The shape of DNA, they called it double helix. By 1994, the project hasn’t finished any genomes of any organisms except for virus. This is because virus’s DNA is much smaller than the other organisms. The Last Unicorn is about tapestries of unicorns and they are considering being the most beautiful tapestries in existence. The unicorn in the tapestries symbolizes many things such as: Christianity, immortality, wisdom, love, and marriage in the middle ages. They have been lost but recovered later and was put in to display. The Self-Cannibals is about humans eating themselves. People who have this disorder will bite themselves and try any other way to harm themselves. This disease is known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. Also in the person’s urine, they would bleed and produce a crystal. The crystal is uric acid which is a waste produce excreted by the kidneys. If a person is high in uric acid, it can lead to gout. Mostly, only males get this and females don’t. This is because the syndrome is on the X-sex chromosome. If a male has it on the X-sex chromosome then he would get it. But if a female has it on one of her X chromosome and does not on the other, then she won’t have it. So this syndrome is X- linked. Another thing about Lesch-Nyhan is that some people will tell you the opposite of what they mean. For example, they would say “I love you” to someone whom they hate.

This book relates to the science concept by that it talks about chromosome, DNA, diseases, and parasites. Biology is the study of living organisms. This includes their structure, evolution, functioning, and pretty much all which relates to them. In the Mountain of Pi, Gregory and David are brothers who are related to each other. They won’t take any jobs or do anything without each other. They created a super computer which they called M zero. Even though they are brothers, their physical and internal feathers are different. Gregory is the sick one and he needs to be looked after. “… Gregory developed an abnormality related to one of his kidneys (Page 26).” Death in the Forest tells of a parasite that inflected the hemlock trees. In nature, the host won’t try to kill the organism. They try to live on it and get its nutrients from it. “In Asia, many kinds of natural predators, especially beetles, eat the woolly adegid, and the host trees have developed resistance to it (Page 49).” This shows evolution for the host trees. At first, the host trees do not have resistance to this parasite. Over time they have resistance to it. The Blood Kiss is just like the parasites. They spread and kill the host. The natural host of Ebola is still unknown; it might be some bats or other creatures. It is known to trans-species jump into new hosts. Then it makes the host really sick and after a week or so the host dies. Scientists predict that Ebola is cause by humans disturbing the forest and have woken up some deadly parasite. “By late January, three members of G.M.’s family had died of la diarrhea rouge. Ten more members of his extended family, who lived in Kikwit and in surrounding villages, also come with it (Page 75).” Ebola spreads fast and dies out fast. The Human Kabbalah tells about DNA decoding. Although there isn’t one organism completed, except for virus, they have move technology forward. Many people try to decode DNA and work forward the future for a better one. “… that one day, Celera would help analyze the genomes of millions of people as a regular part of its business… the company would then help design or select drugs tailored to patients’ particular needs (Page 91).” Their goal for the future is this where everyone can get drugs that have reactions to the patients. The last thing that Craig’s did was decoding the DNA of a dog. The Self-Cannibals tells about a syndrome that some people get when they are born. This relates to mutation of DNA. Mutation is a change in the DNA. Mutation can happen in the chromosome or the gene. In the chromosome there can be a deletion, inversion, translocation, or nondisjunction. In a gene mutation, point mutation, substitution, frameshift mutation, and insertion mutation may happen. “A child born with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome seems normal at first, but by the age of three months has become a so-called floppy baby, and can’t hold up his head or sit up. His diaper may have orange sand in them, and his body begins a pattern of writhing. When the boy cuts his first teeth, he starts using them to bite himself, especially at night, and he screams in terror and pain during these bouts of self-mutilation (Page 154).” The child does not know what he is doing even it hurts himself. The boy is in pain but he can’t stop. The kid would want to hurt himself more and more when he gets the change to.

This book is changing or effecting science and society by that many people who is interested in biology really learned something from this book. Some places normal people can’t go like the Hot Zone. The Hot Zone is a military base that researches many different kinds of virus and diseases such as Ebola. The title of this book relates to the Hot Zone which the Ebola virus has to be kept in level 4 since it was so deadly. The author change society by that he went to look for and tell the stories of many disease and virus. Richard Preston also went inside the Hot Zone and risk getting the virus. In an interview in the Hot Zone, his suit broke and he might have gotten the virus. Richard talked a lot about the virus Ebola. In this other stories, he talked about parasites and disorders. This help the people learn something about the parasites or disorder. Also people learn that Ebola spreads by contact in the blood stream, if the virus or parasite kills the host very fast then that is not the natural host of that kind of virus or parasite and much more. Also every organism has contributed to virus or disease. Virus cannot reproduce on its own it needs a host’s cell to reproduce. So in conclusion, this book changes the society in a few ways and helps many people gain knowledge about the science world.