From CGI member oldmaninThedesert. CGI is RMN's readers forum where oldman is a member.

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Continuing with Richard Preston's work 'The Hot Zone',this time right in their backyard...

...THE CITY OF Reston, Virginia, is a prosperous community about ten miles west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway. On a fall day, when a western wind clears the air, from the upper floors of the office buildings in Reston you can see the creamy spike of Washington Monument, sitting in the middle of the Mall, and beyond it the Capitol dome. The population of Reston has grown in recent years, and high-technology business and bluechip consulting firms have moved into office parks there, where glass buildings grew up during the nineteen-eighties like crystals. Before the crystals appeared, Reston was surrounded by farmland, and it still contains meadows. In spring, the meadows burst into galaxies of yellow-mustard flowers, and robins and thrashers sing in stands of tulip tresses and white ash. The town offers handsome residential neighborhoods, good schools, parks, golf courses, excellent day care for children. There are lakes in Reston named American naturalists (like Thoreau, Lake Audubon), surrounded by expensive water-front homes. Reston is situated within easy commuting distance of downtown Washington. Along Leesburg Pike, which funnels traffic into the city, there are developments of executive homes with Mercedes-Benzes parked in crescent-shaped driveways. Reston was once a country town, and its history still flights obliteration, like a nail that won't stay hammered down. Among the upscale houses, you see the occasionally bungalow with cardboard stuffed in a broken window and a pickup truck parked in the side yard. In the autumn, vegetable stands along Leeburg Pike sell pumpkins and butternut squash.

Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald's is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc. Corning's Hazleton unit is involved with the importation and sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.

Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/12/part-3-hot-zonethe-monkey-house-reston.html