The man who discovered Ebola | 1 February 2015

By some quirk of fate, just as news reached the papers that the Scottish nurse who had contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was now recovered, the guest on that Radio 4 staple Desert Island Discs was the scientist who first identified the virus. This gave a programme that can seem rather outdated and superficial a whole new resonance, providing the back story to the news, adding that frisson of inquiry, of revelation. Did Professor Peter Piot, as a young researcher working at Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine almost 40 years ago, realise he was seeing something quite new and so dangerous? ‘It looked like war,’ he told Kirsty Young after giving us a vivid description of how the virus arrived at the lab in a shiny blue Thermos flask, ‘just like the kind you use for coffee’, brought by a Belgian pilot straight from Kinshasa, capital of what was then Zaire.