Stephen S. Hall

About the author: Stephen S. Hall is the science editor for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and author of such biological studies as Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene and A Commotion in the Blood: Life, Death, and the Immune System.

Science fiction novels, such as Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, have done much to exacerbate fears over America's susceptibility to attacks by biological and chemical weapons. President Bill Clinton's alarmist call to budget hundreds of millions of dollars to safeguard the United States against such attacks in the year 2000 came suspiciously on the heels of his reading The Cobra Event. Yet many experts agree that the catastrophic events described in these works of science fiction could never occur...