Wendy Orent

Wendy Orent is an American anthropologist and science writer with a focus on pandemics, biological weapons, and the evolution of infectious diseases. She is a freelance science writer whose work has appeared in "The Washington Post", "Aeon", "Undark Magazine", "The Sciences", "The Los Angeles Times", "The New Republic", "Discover", and "The American Prospect". She holds a BA in anthropology and zoology, which included considerable training in evolutionary theory with Richard D. Alexander, whose assistant she was and who advised her honors thesis, as well as a PhD in anthropology, both from the University of Michigan.

Life[]

Orent assisted Russian scientist Igor Domaradskij in the writing of his memoir, Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine.^[1] Domaradskij, the co-designer of the entire Soviet biological weapons program known as Biopreparat, carried out the research leading to the creation of an antibiotic resistant strain of Yersinia pestis, the plague germ. This collaboration led her to an interest in plague, and she is the first to propose that the Black Death, like the Manchurian/North China pandemics of 1910, 1916, and 1920, developed from plague from Central Asian marmots, the only animals, aside from humans, to acquire and spread pneumonic plague. She discussed this in her own book, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease.^[2]

Orent, using Paul Ewald’s Theory of Virulence, argued, along with Ewald, that highly-pathogenic H5N1 avian flu was unlikely to evolve into a lethal pandemic, largely because the conditions necessary to transmit this highly evolved chicken flu did not exist. For one thing, the receptors used by the H5N1 virus to attach to human cells were found deep in the lungs, where they were unlikely to be transmitted. This was a highly-controversial position at the time, but Ewald’s and Orent’s arguments, in this aspect at least, have come to be widely accepted independently by many other scientists.

Orent has also written several articles on the ongoing threat of COVID-19, stressing, based on her work in biological weapons and in evolutionary theory, that the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to lie in live animal markets than in any sort of laboratory escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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