Yes. He was indeed. I found it fascinating to read about the movie “The Andromeda Strain” where he wanted the movie to be ultra-realistic, and actually purchased state of the art equipment for the time that would have been used to identify the pathogen.
In the movie, to determine the size of a filtering material they needed to be safe to breathe the air, they had a machine with set filter sizes, and would expose a susceptible creature like a guinea pig or rat to contaminated air making the filter successively finer until the animal was not infected, and they could determine the size of the pathogen to X nanometers depending on the filter that provided protection.
Yes. He was a talented and interesting guy. One of my absolute favorite books of his is “State of Fear”. He so accurately captured the essence of the environmental moonbats on the Left and thoroughly skewered them. One of my favorite scenes from the book is the good guys being tailed by the evil bad guys in a car as they drove around. If it were the Mafia, they would be driving Cadillacs. If it were the KGB they might be tailing you in a “Black Maria”.
In “State of Fear” the evil bad guys bent on murder drove...Toyota Prius’!!!
“would expose a susceptible creature like a guinea pig or rat to contaminated air making the filter successively finer until the animal was not infected”
I would think the opposite approach, starting with a very fine filter then enlarging it until the subject WAS infected would save you a lot of money on animal subjects...