American journalist, author and science enthusiast. His nonfiction “The Hot Zone” won the Overseas Press Club of America’s Whitman Bassow Award for best reporting in any medium on environmental issues. Fascinated and terrified of the destructive capacity of such a virus as Ebola, he wrote of how, in 1989, lab monkeys imported from the Philippines started an outbreak of Ebola until the government closed in to contain it.
The first son of Jerome, an attorney, and Dorothy, a painter, Richard spent his childhood in Wellesley, MA with brothers two and four years younger. Inheriting an instinct for adventure from his parents and with a natural aptitude for science and anarchy, he was designing rockets by his early teens. He graduated from Pomona College in California in 1977 and won a scholarship in a graduate English program at Princeton University. His first book, astronomically inspired “First Light,” was published in 1988 and “The Hot Zone,” the story of the Ebola virus in Virginia, became a No.1 bestseller published in 30 languages in 1995. In 1997 the rights to “The Cobra Event,” his first novel, were sold to Fox for $3 million, one of the largest amounts ever for a first novel.
Preston, a world traveler, is in the forefront of emerging virus tracking and biotechnology and is considered an expert. He has been called upon by every major media organization in the U.S. and abroad: the FBI and President Clinton sought his opinion and input and he has testified before the U.S. Senate. Preston has won the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT as well as the Whitman Bassow Award.
Preston met Michelle Parham while a grad student at Princeton and they were wed in 1985. They have three kids, daughters in 1985 and1987 and a son in 1993.
Link to Wikipedia biography