Guillemin was part of an international team of scientists that visited Russia in 1992 to investigate a 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the Ural Mountains region that officially killed 64 people who had eaten tainted meat. Unofficially, the toll was estimated in the thousands, and the cause was pinned on the government's surreptitious experiments with biological warfare. In this medical detective story, Guillemin tracks the process of gathering information, some of it mishandled or misplaced, including autopsies, slides, and tissue samples. Guillemin conveys the human side of this frightening outbreak through interviews with family members of the anthrax victims. Anthrax is a deadly disease, typically found in animals and capable of remaining in the soil for as long as 70 years. Russian officials later conceded the outbreak was due to government experiments, but many details remain a mystery. Guillemin's fascinating account includes an exploration of how anthrax is being used in biological warfare by groups as diverse as religious fundamentalists in the Middle East and white supremacists in the U.S. --Vanessa Bush

In a dense and unsettling work, Boston College sociologist Guillemin depicts her 1992 journey to Russia to research a mysterious 1979 anthrax epidemic: little was known about the outbreak, in which 64 died in the remote province of Yekaterinburg, between Kazakhstan and Siberia. In pat and conflicting comments, Russian authorities said the outbreak had followed anthrax's usual pattern, deriving from either soil, ceramics dust or contaminated meat. But a general suspicion developed in the scientific and intelligence communities that the anthrax had resulted from a more unusual aerosol emission from the nearby Compound 19, a weapons facility. Was the outbreak a result of biological weapons technology? Guillemin's team members gather the evidence, though they are unable to establish a definitive answer. Her sociological background leads her to focus on the human variables in this scientific mystery; by tracking down survivors of the outbreak, she hoped to shed light on the enigmas of the disease's dispersal rate and pattern. Unfortunately, her recounting of many minute sparring sessions with the team's wily Russian counterparts, as well as a morass of sociological commentary on a fragmenting postcommunist Russian society, are prolix. Though it raises disturbing questions about research in biological warfare, this medical mystery is more appropriate for epidemiology and other medical professionals rather than fans of The Hot Zone. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An absorbing first-person account of an investigation into a mysterious 1979 anthrax epidemic in the Soviet Union, the worst ever recorded in a modern industrial nation. Soviet officials at first denied there was an epidemic and then claimed that it was caused by infected black-market meat, but in the United States some intelligence analysts believed the cause was an explosion in a biological weapons factory. With the Cold War over, foreign scientists were permitted to enter Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk at the time of the outbreak) in 1992, and Guillemin's husband, a Harvard biologist, led a small group of experts into Russia to discover the cause of the outbreak. Guillemin (Sociology/Boston Univ.), was the team's anthropologist. While the medical and biological team members sought to discover through autopsy materials whether the anthrax had entered victims' bodies through the lungs or the digestive system, Guillemin located and interviewed families of the victims to find out where they were at the time, what they were doing, and what they had eaten. Later, she mapped the victims' locations and correlated them with weather data showing wind speed and direction at the time. She supplements her grim, detailed description of these labors with an account of two return visits that to Yekaterinburg that revealed serious deficiencies in Russia's health system and left her with serious doubts about the country's stability. The data eventually assembled by the team contradicted Russian claims, but did not support US intelligence fears either. Yet, as Guillemin notes, the outbreak was as much about morality and political accountability as science: The state had failed to protect its citizens, and the medical professionals, like the military, had kept their silence. Makes palpable the virulence of anthrax as a biological weapon, raises important accountability issues, and questions our own country's leadership in arms control. (48 b&w photos, 4 maps, 2 tables)