Bozeman Magazine

Local author David Quammen shares his newest book, the masterful scientific detective story Breathless, with a Q&A and signing to follow. The New York Times has called David Quammen "our greatest living chronicler of the natural world." He has won three National Magazine awards and numerous awards in science writing, and is a contributing writer for National Geographic Magazine. The Tangled Tree was shortlisted for the National Book Award.  Spillover was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and won several other awards.

Breathless takes you inside the frantic international effort to understand and control SARS-CoV-2 as if we were peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists who led the chase. Describing COVID-19 as "a horrific sorrow to humanity," Quammen fashions a sort of biography of the virus and a masterful scientific detective story. 

Quammen shares the biology and story of COVID-19 by looking ""over the shoulders of scientists"" and interviewing almost 100 around the globe. His discussion features zoonotic spillover (the transfer of a virus from an animal host to humans), RNA viruses (and their penchant for frequent mutations and rapid adaptation), herd immunity, and vaccine development. The astonishing science depicted here, from bioinformatics to epidemiology and molecular biology, is formidable and sometimes head-spinning. Its passionate practitioners (who create clarity and order out of mystery and mayhem) truly are lab coat-wearing and biohazard-suited heroes.

Breathless is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a "forever virus," destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.

Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains that: 

-Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming 

-Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that "the next big one" would be caused by a changeable new virus--very possibly a coronavirus--but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons 

-The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed 

-And much more.