Pandora's Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk

by Alison Young

Overview

This fearless, deeply reported book about laboratory accidents asks the haunting question some elite scientists don’t want the public to entertain: Did the COVID-19 pandemic start with a lab leak in Wuhan, China?
 
This is an obvious question. Yet there’s been an extraordinary effort by government officials in China, as well as leading scientific experts in the United States and around the world, to shut down any investigation or discussion of the lab leak theory. In private, however, some of the world’s elite scientists have seen a lab accident as a very real and horrifying possibility. They know what the public doesn’t. Lab accidents happen with shocking frequency. Even at the world’s best-run labs.

That’s among the revelations from Alison Young, the award-winning investigative reporter who has spent nearly 15 years uncovering shocking safety breaches at prestigious U.S. laboratories for USA Today and other respected news outlets.
 
In Pandora’s Gamble, Young goes deep into the troubling history — and enormous risks — of leaks and accidents at scientific labs. She takes readers on a riveting journey around the world to some of the worst lab mishaps in history, including the largely unknown stories of the lab workers at the U.S. Army’s Camp Detrick who suffered devastating infections at alarming rates during World War II. And her groundbreaking reporting exposes for the first time disturbing new details about recent accidents at prestigious laboratories – and the alarming gaps in government oversight that put all of us at risk. 
 
Sourced through meticulous reporting and exclusive interviews with key players including Dr. Anthony Fauci, former CDC Director Tom Frieden and others, Young’s examination reveals that the only thing rare about lab accidents is the public rarely finds out about them. Because when accidents happen, powerful people and institutions often work hard to keep the information secret.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668631195
Publisher:	Hachette Book Group
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alison Young is a veteran journalist who has worked as a reporter and editor for national and regional news organizations, including USA Today, the Detroit Free Press and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While in Atlanta, Young covered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her investigative reporting on science and health issues has received dozens of journalism awards, including from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In 2019, Young joined the faculty of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where she helps train the next generation of journalists.

Pamela Almand, a former international 747 pilot for Delta Airlines, launched an unlikely second career after appearing in a national television spot for Tylenol in 1995. Several regional spots for Northwest Airlines followed, and she began narrating training and industry videos, built a professional recording studio, and launched the Captain’s Voice. Since then, Pamela has provided voice-over for major corporate clients worldwide, including Microsoft, Disney, Canadian Realtors, the United Nations, Zurich, International Red Cross, and the hotels and casinos of Monte Carlo. She is a SAG/AFTRA voice actor and audiobook narrator with multiple awards and nominations from the Audio Publishers Association’s Audie Awards, Society of Voice Arts and Sciences’ Voice Arts Awards, and AudioFile magazine’s Earphones Award. She lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida, with her husband, Amos.

Editorial Reviews

"She renders scientific issues in lucid, accessible prose that vividly conveys the insidious nature of potentially lethal microbes...A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Before the rest of us were paying attention, Alison Young was covering the dangers of safety lapses at the world’s top laboratories. She opens her meticulously reported, deeply alarming book by exploring the 'horrifying possibility' that Covid-19 was the result of just such a breach in China. Essential reading for policymakers – and the public."—Susan Page, Washington Bureau chief, USA TODAY, and author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power

"Pandora’s Gamble is a triumph of tenacity. Alison Young honed in on America’s poorly monitored labs before other reporters and used Freedom of Information to pry loose the government’s secrets. No other reporter has shown the discipline and patience to document this outrage."—Marilyn W. Thompson, author of The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed

"Rigorously reported and surgically presented, Pandora’s Gamble cuts through the partisan noise that obscured the answer to the greatest question of the century. Employing all the tools of true investigative reporting, Young presents the terrifying history of lab leaks and the people and institutions determined to keep them secret. Her decades of digging into the cultural, scientific, and political machinations few of us understood before 2020 now serves to remind us that ideological credulity and willful ignorance are not the domain of any one political party, but a bug of humanity itself. As COVID taught us time and again, human error poses a threat as great any nature may have lying in wait."—J. David McSwane, author of Pandemic Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick

"In her new book, Pandora’s Gamble, Young lays out the shocking extent of lax laboratory standards and procedures, and lack of accountability and transparency, in the United States and around the world….Young’s book raises a much-needed alarm about the dangers of ignoring the need to do things right. The stakes are too high."—Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times

From the Publisher

★ 2023-09-22
Deadly germs escape from advanced laboratories with alarming and perhaps catastrophic consequences, according to this sobering nonfiction book.

Investigative journalist Young, who’s worked as a reporter and editor for such outlets as USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explores lapses, accidents, and disasters at high-containment Biosafety Level 2, 3, and 4 laboratories around the world. They include a 1978 smallpox outbreak at a lab at Britain’s Birmingham University that resulted in the world’s last smallpox death (in which the remorseful lab director committed suicide); a 1979 anthrax release from a Soviet bioweapons lab in Sverdlovsk, which killed dozens of people; several leaks of contaminated wastewater at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick biological research institute in 2018, which may have traveled to the nearby town of Frederick, Maryland; a lab tech’s death from a bacterial infection in a San Francisco Veterans Administration medical center; several leaks of a SARS-associate coronavirus from Asian labs in 2003 and 2004, resulting in one death; and the exposure of lab workers to engineered microbes during “gain of function” research that seeks to make pathogens more infectious. A lengthy chapter explores the possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Young dives deeply into how lab safeguards can fail because of equipment breakdowns, leaky pipes, holes in biohazard suits, mislabeled vials, accidental needle sticks, and other circumstances. The book also offers an absorbing account of Young’s own dogged reporting as she visits labs (she once found a high-tech containment-lab door sealed shut with duct tape), pries information out of reluctant officials, and receives tips from anonymous sources. She renders scientific issues in lucid, accessible prose that vividly conveys the insidious nature of potentially lethal microbes: “Other liquid or solid particles were so small they became airborne, spreading on invisible air currents, pushed along by heating and cooling systems, the opening and closing of doors, and the movement of people between rooms and down hallways.” Throughout, Young shows just how perilous infectious-disease research can be.

A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat.

Kirkus Reviews