Outsmarting Ebola

In a piece in this week’s magazine titled “The Ebola Wars,” Richard Preston reports on a doctor’s efforts to combat the disease in Sierra Leone, and follows researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. as they study the virus’s genetic code. On this week’s podcast, Preston, the author of the 1994 best-seller “The Hot Zone,” about the origins of Ebola, joins Sasha Weiss, the literary editor of newyorker.com, to clear up misconceptions about the current outbreak and discuss the efforts of physicians and epidemiologists to contain the disease.In a piece in this week’s magazine titled “The Ebola Wars,” Richard Preston reports on a doctor’s efforts to combat the disease in Sierra Leone, and follows researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. as they study the virus’s genetic code. On this week’s podcast, Preston, the author of the 1994 best-seller “The Hot Zone,” about the origins of Ebola, joins Sasha Weiss, the literary editor of newyorker.com, to clear up misconceptions about the current outbreak and discuss the efforts of physicians and epidemiologists to contain the disease.