The reproduce, but they don’t eat, breathe or excrete

James Meek

• The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses by Dorothy Crawford
  Oxford, 275 pp, £14.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 19 850332 6

Last September, the Royal Society organised a conference to discuss Edward Hooper’s book The River, which promoted the theory that HIV was accidentally spread to humans from chimpanzees through a polio vaccination programme in Africa in the 1950s. Coincidentally, or not, on the eve of the conference, a British TV channel screened the 1995 Hollywood thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman as a maverick military virologist given hours to find a vaccine to halt the spread of a deadly African virus in California before the military obliterates the town where it has taken hold. The film’s opening is set in Africa and based on the emergence of the Ebola virus, which was first recorded in northern Zaire in 1976, where it infected 318 people, 280 of whom died. Outbreak then goes astray: rather than portraying years of clinical trials and exhaustive lab work, the movie locates the key to getting the vaccine for the fictional virus in the ability of Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr to dodge heat-seeking missiles in a tree-top helicopter chase.