11 ms·

Congolese doctor discovered Ebola, but didn't get credit until now

370 points by respinal 7y ago

nkozyra 7y ago
On the one hand, this is the classic story of colonialism: that the "winners" write the history books. There are likely thousands of stories like this, not the least of which in the woefully exploited African continent. On the other hand, "discovery" is a nebulous term, and plenty of discoveries have inconclusive origins. Why would we call this doctor the discoverer and not the first hospital workers to encounter the disease? Neither knew what it was, both groups thought it something new. Same with the Belgian researcher, (contestedly) named the discoverer. Identifying a disease is the kind of thing that's not going to come from one cook in the kitchen. I'm glad this guy is getting recognition, it sounds like he's a noble person who played a critical role in uncovering Ebola and leading to its present level of controllability. Most philosophical and scientific concepts have concurrent or disparate discoverers or inventors. And even those that don't have borrowed so much from precedent that you can often make the case the discovery was previously made.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Yes nothing is objective here. History is a double simplification. From the writer to the reader... Both decides to accept the summary.
- _carl_jung 7y ago
  We see the same thing in software. I've heard people answer "Grace Hopper", "Ada Lovelace", "Charles Babbage", "Alan Turing", etc. to the same question about the origin of computers. The real thing is the question needs to be more specific. Is it the origin of programmable computers? The origin of programming itself? The origin of non-programmable computers? And so on. I'm no epidemiologist, but I imagine something similar is at work here. As you say, different people performed different key roles in the whole process which constitutes "discovery" of Ebola.
  - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
    > I've heard people answer "Grace Hopper", "Ada Lovelace", "Charles Babbage", "Alan Turing", etc. to the same question about the origin of computers. You forgot Gottfried W. Leibniz. Another question is its historical impacts: did it have any influence on its further development? A good account of history should document and analyze them from different perspectives. You can have the credit of being the "first" even it doesn't have much influence, and you can have the credit of being influential even it doesn't have much publicity. And often the story is not black-and-white. For example, we can say Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed and conclude that it has no influence on its further design. But we you know that the story of Charles Babbage helped Howard Aiken at IBM selling his machine? (Harvard Mark I).
    - emmelaich 7y ago
      I thought of Leibniz too. > "In Leibniz's mind, “this language will be the greatest instrument of reason,” for “when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, and see who is right”"
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    3 of those 4 just seem... plain wrong? The first design of a general-purpose computer was obviously Babbage's. Wikipedia says work on it started in 1833, after the difference engine (already completed by 1822). He even developed two dozen programs for it between 1837-1840. He just ran into funding issues for his projects. Now if for some reason you feel an urge to hold an external issue like the lack of funding against him when giving credit, then you'd give credit to Konrad Zuse's Z3 (1941) for the first completed implementation. The fact that most computer scientists haven't even heard his name is evidence enough in my eyes that that's a thin rope to hang onto, but whatever. Beyond that, I find mention of those 3 other people just bizarre. If the person who actually produced the first design for a computer started its implementation doesn't get the credit, and the person who finally built the first one doesn't get the credit either... then are you sure your credit criteria are actually reasonable?!
    - 7y ago
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  I agree. A classic example is the story of the semiconductor and radio. The popular history said that the point-contact transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs and started the age of semiconductors. But do you know that Russian physicist Oleg Losev (also a pioneer of LED) discovered negative resistance in zinc-oxide diodes in 1923, and built solid-state amplifiers, oscillators, regenerative and superheterodyne radio receivers, 25 years before the transistor, but starved to death in the hunger during Nazi Germany's invasion and forgotten? And do you know that at the same year, 1923, American physicist J. Edgar Lilienfeld (also a pioneer of electrolytic capacitor), invented the first prototype of the Field-Effect Transistor, but due to technical limitations and his failure to publizie his researches in big-name journals, remained unknown for a long time? At the end of the day, I think some simplification and ignorance is acceptable in entry-level/popular history books, but in more advanced-level history books, all the known co-inventors/co-discoverers who have made contributions deserve a mention. Wikipedia has a good "list of multiple discoveries". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
  - wbl 7y ago
    Negative resistance devices are very tricky to use since you need a non reciprocal element. Bell created a design that was commercially useful and widely applicable and later iterations (contact, planar BJT) cam from it.
    - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
      > Negative resistance devices are very tricky to use Sure... I'm not an engineer, but I read that tunnel diodes were hailed as the greatest innovation in semiconductor of the 1960s, and it was often the only available option in high-frequency applications, but they were almost completely abandoned when integrated circuits became feasible. Leaving the embarrassing situation that the tunnel diodes in lot of vintage Tektronix oscilloscopes are unobtainium. > Bell created a design that was commercially useful and widely applicable This is kind of the point made by the original comment. Arguing about the "first" sometimes is a waste of time, it's better to list all the codiscoverers and discuss their respective contributions.
- Merrill 7y ago
  Priority is a big deal for academic researchers, the people who write journal articles and books. When I worked in development, organization was formal and collaborations were informal. People shared ideas and exactly who thought up what wasn't too important. Overall performance mattered more. Documents that were published were only circulated internally. Patents were sometimes applied for, but inventorship was settled informally. After I transferred to research I was struck by how important priority of ideas became. Organization was informal but collaborations became formal. Who was principle investigator was very important. Publications were external and who's name appeared in what order was very important. Patents were fought over. Even in an industrial research lab it got pretty weird. I can only imagine how it is at a place like CDC. Being first author on a paper describing a new disease probably makes your career.
- johnmarinelli 7y ago
  The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola, but I think this only perpetuates and helps internalise colonialism. I think a more clear cut case on the issue how the music industry ripped off Chuck Berry and repackaged him as Elvis Presley. The more we ignore and "justify" the issue with intellectualism, the farther away we all get from a real solution.
  - dmix 7y ago
    There's countless examples of this phenomenon happening while having nothing to do with 'colonialism', blaming that as the primary cause that needs to be addressed seems like selective reasoning. Even AIDs was "co-discovered" (meaning first to identify it as a retrovirus and published in a paper) by a team in France and one in the US around the same time, and only the French team got a nobel prize 25yrs later which was controversial for similar reasons that it's a difficult thing to identify (also note it takes a long time to get this sort of credit). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier
  - nkozyra 7y ago
    > The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola I agree and addressed that. I don't disagree that colonialism's dark past plays a significant role in these things, but my larger point is "discovery" is always a hotly contested concept. I'm certainly not attempting to justify or mitigate it, that's specifically the reason I talked about colonialism first. It's important to frame much of our present day as being in the shadow of 19th and 20th century European exploitation abroad.
  - throw_m239339 7y ago
    It has absolutely nothing to do with "colonialism" as an intersectional buzzword. People take credit for other people's discoveries all the time(Edison for instance), and in this article this isn't even the case. The person who actually identified the virus "ebola" isn't the black guy that took blood samples of infected patients. Saying otherwise is rewriting history to fit an intersectional narrative, which is no better than what you call colonial mentality. Should teams get credit for discoveries instead of individuals? Sure and both people should get recognition. But let's not be hyperbolic here or claim this is the result of "colonialism", whatever it means in the mouth of people who use that word out of context. I'm baffled as to how some people always fall for that old intersectional shtick of claiming there is racism,sexism,colonialism everywhere and in everything, just because someone says so. It completely weakens the meaning of these words and turn them into insignificant weasel words because after all they apply to anything...
- Iv 7y ago
  Ironically, the person credited for that was a Belgian who felt he was bullied by British into giving up the analysis to them. It is contempt all the way up. "[Pattyn] claimed that we needed a few more days to ready it for transport," Piot wrote. "So we kept a few tubes of VERO cells, as well as some of the newborn mice, which were dying. Perhaps it was a stubborn rebellion against the whole Belgian history of constantly being forced to grovel to a greater power. That material was just too valuable, too glorious to let it go."
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  Your argument is valid, but I would like to point out that without context it reads as if the article and the Congolese doctor in question do not acknowledge this. However, they do: > The discovery, says Muyembe, was thanks to a "consortium of research." But Google "Who discovered Ebola?" and you get a bunch of names — all of them white Western males. Dr. Jean Jacques Muyembe has been written out of history. "Yes, but it is ..." he pauses. He takes a breath and laughs, looking for the right way to respond. "Yes. It is not correct," he says. "It is not correct." ... and since the internet is full of people who love to comment on articles without actually reading them I think that is worth explicitly mentioning here. (to be clear: not a slight against your comment)
  - nkozyra 7y ago
    I read the article, I thought it was a point worth addressing in more depth and HN has a rule specifically against this type of comment.
    - vanderZwan 7y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that you did not read the article - it was clear to me that you did. To clarify: your point is valid and nuanced. I have just noticed both here and elsewhere that it is very common for people to read the comments first and react there without reading the article. So I was picturing the scenario where one would open this discussion, see your top comment, and go off on speculative discussions that are already addressed by the article in question.
lbj 7y ago
How is this valuable to hackers?
- vwuon 7y ago
  A black person felt bad and you're asking this? Just how heartless and vile can you be?
drk23 7y ago
Yea, reading the story, its bullsh as expected. He did not discover Ebola. It was the idiot tasked to get blood samples in some far away jungle. If he "discoverd" ebola, why he, not patient 0? That really stretches the meaning of "discover". But well, what do i know, he IS black after all.
- thombat 7y ago
  We must have read different stories. The one I read was about Jean-Jacques Muyembe, PhD in microbiology, who elected to return to his homeland to work as an epidemiologist, and when called to a disease outbreak recognised it as something novel and arranged for blood samples to be sent to a Belgian lab.
  - Double_a_92 7y ago
    Well his contribution then was recognizing that it probably was not yellow fever, typhoid or malaria and that is was very deadly. If some other doctor (that happened to be white) with better equipment was the first to really see what was going on... How is that colonial racism or anything? It's just how things were, to the western doctors Muyembe really was just someone that happened to take the blood samples. But you know what is actually toxic national pride? This: > "He decided that all of the blood samples collected during this Ebola epidemic will stay in Congo. Anyone who wants to study this outbreak will have to come to his institute. ... But Piot says the decision was obviously made because of how African scientists have been treated. " Hindering scientific progress that could help his very own people out of spite and revenge!
    - mcv 7y ago
      It could also help his own people if they got recognition for their part, and the resources that come with that. Wasn't the fact that he did not have access to the equipment he needed, itself a sign of colonial racism? And yeah, chances are that if a white doctor had made the same discovery, they would have been credited with the discovery.
ecmascript 7y ago
This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery. Seems like a very dishonest piece of article and I doubt this article paints a fair view of how things actually were. The article could pretty much be summed up by "white scientist = bad, black scientist = good". With that being said, I am sure a case could be made that he should have been given more attention and credit but so should everyone who helped in the beginning. What about all the nameless nurses etc? If this isn't NPC think, I don't know what is.
- dm3730 7y ago
  > This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery. Which article did you read? Because the article linked in above explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism. People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point. It is nice to see that Peter was able to get past his prejudice, better late than never. " When asked if he feels responsible for writing Muyembe out of history, Piot pauses. "I think that's a fair comment," he says. "But my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience." " Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.
  - rukittenme 7y ago
    > People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point. > [The article] explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism. Uhhhh.... lol. A strict reading of the article would reveal that Piot never admits to racism (on his part) and admits to no attempt to "write out Muyembe". Piot accuses others of being racist (those same others he admitted to harboring resentment for) but without evidence his claims are as valid as Muyembe. I mean really... how are you going to accuse TWO PEOPLE of racism when you lack the ability to read four sentences.
denzil_correa 7y ago
The core of the article is the following summary from Dr. Peter Piot the scientist credited for the Ebola discovery. > Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.
chirau 7y ago
What's new here? As an African myself I am not surprised at all. History favors its author. Explorer David Livingstone is credited with discovering the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Despite the multitude of accounts and documentation of the locals' Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) prior to his arrival. But hey, according to history it seems the locals had never encountered a waterfall a mile wide and hundreds of meters deep whose plunge creates a mini eternal rainforest in the area and the plunge can be heard from a distance away out of sight of the falls themselves. But yes, it was David Livingstone who "discovered" the falls. Oh, did I mention that from his own account, he was escorted by locals to the falls?
- account73466 7y ago
  Not in the current version of history, see from Wikipedia: "On this leg he became the first European to see the Mosi-o-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders") waterfall, which he named Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria."
  - mcv 7y ago
    Wikipedia is a good vehicle for correcting this excessively Eurocentric view of history. It's editable to anyone in the world, and it has always put effort into support all countries and all languages (even some fairly obscure ones). And it's used by everybody across the world. That makes it a great tool for teaching Europeans a bit about the rest of the world. Unlike most western encyclopedias, it's not just written by Europeans and Americans.
- jlawson 7y ago
  Last week I discovered a wonderful sushi restaurant near my work. I told my work friends about it and now we all love it. It doesn't mean nobody in the world knew about that sushi restaurant before me. It means nobody in my group knew about it, nobody told me, and I found it by personal experience, and shared the information among my community. So yes, David Livingstone discovered the falls. We don't constantly have to try to degrade the contributions that western people made to the world just because they're white. Livingstone made huge sacrifices to push on where almost everyone else gave up and he linked together pathways of information that didn't exist before. He did the exploring; he took the risk; he should get credit _for those efforts and sacrifices_ as should the people who sent him. Its ridiculous to try to equate his achievement with the people who were simply born in the areas he explored and lived there as their default state of traditional existence.
belorn 7y ago
In diving there is a repeating patter of wrecks being discovered and rediscovered which usually follow the same pattern. A researcher is looking for a famous wreck and locate local fishermen who says they know where it is. They go there, find the wreck, write about it in a journal, and then it get forgotten. A new researcher goes and look for the same wreck and again goes to local fishermen who points the researcher to the wreck, a book get written and the wreck get named after the now official discoverer.
mikorym 7y ago
Altohugh I am not particularly upset about it, South African scientists have often not gotten recognition and even the white males ones! [1] [2] I think the discrimination is worse in a way than described in the article. But maybe that touches even on the philosophy of individual recognition itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard#First_human-to-human_heart_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard#First_human.... I've been told that in particular, the USA was not keen of giving someone outside of the US recognition for the first heart transplant. And somewhat ironically, Chris Barnard's brother that was part of the team, Marius, did not get recognition (but that may have been due to his less extravagant personality). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Barnard_(surgeon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Barnard_(surgeon) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_transplant From what I understand, the US was again hesitant to cede to South Africa, instead stressing the first "penis and scrotum" transplant.
- mikorym 7y ago
  * although
finnthehuman 7y ago
People not getting proper credit is the norm, not the exception. I'm always suspicious of articles like this. They're written like the public record is mostly right and correcting this one inaccuracy was an important contribution. But the public record is silent on most things and of questionable accuracy on the rest. My professional experience is that people not caring about external attention and credit is the default. And people seeking that external validation and/or press attention don't care about getting the boundaries right, they care about getting as many sales or as much adulation as possible. There is a parallel within organizations: either management knows how to reward people without them making sure their name is on things, or they don't and people try to get their name on everything regardless of their contribution. And that's just the groundwork before we get to the fact the press rarely operates at a level above functional illiteracy for anything that takes domain knowledge.
Alinax 7y ago
A lot of people seem to be out of their depth attributing to malice what can be simple stupidity or different sets of prioritization. Here is a few things to consider as you may be attempting to build a 'colonialism or racism' tone to your perspective: [IF YOU BELIEVE I AM WRONG, I WOULD BE HAPPY TO CHANGE MY MIND OR DISCUSS THE MATTER INSTEAD OF UP/DOWN VOTES] * Did Dr. Piot think of colonialism when the WHO thought that the UK and US were better equipped to handle this new discovery? * What if a more junior doctor in Muyembe's team made the conclusion and Muyembe used his position in power to get the vial to Europe? * Should you as a researcher/doctor hold a discovery back for a few days/weeks/years and let people die for the sake of your name being put on it? * What constitutes a discovery in such case? Concluding it might be something different and moving it forward or doing the lab work to figure out what it is? What not both? Should the treatment be considered a discovery? Should Muyembe add the name of all the people that came before him that provided the tools/knowledge to arrive at the treatment? * Should Eyder Peralta (writer of the post) and NPR (an American news company) be seeing as anti-colonialist? * Do country X attribute their success in part to other countries who gave them aid to get infrastructure, training , goods & services they need?
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  "Did Dr. Piot think of colonialism when the WHO thought that the UK and US were better equipped to handle this new discovery?" But Dr. Piot himself he intentionally left out the pepole who provided him with the evidence to make his claims, who themselves made the claims he was merely confirming.
rayiner 7y ago
> He took blood samples before she died and sent them to Belgium, where they had an electron microscope to try to identify the culprit. Scientists there and in the United States saw this was a new virus that caused hemorrhagic fever. I think the whole thing is more complicated than the article makes it out to be. Clearly, Muyembe should get credit for the field epidemiology and recognizing that this could be something new. But can you say, as the article does, that someone “discovered” Ebola if they didn’t isolate the virus that causes it? Now you can argue the reason Muyembe couldn’t isolate the virus was because of colonialism and the Congolese government not being able to afford an expensive piece of equipment like an electron microscope. But would the Congolese have had electron microscopes but for Belgian colonialism? I mean, there is a great story here even without the sensationalism. Man from Congo gets a PhD in Belgium, goes back home to help his country, but is held back by lack of local resources. What does Belgium owe in terms of equipping it’s former colony to help themselves? There is good material there. As someone from a poor former colony myself, I find the whole thing somewhat patronizing. Bangladeshis rely on European and American geneticists to develop GMO rice to feed the country. But if the British hadn’t colonized us, it’s not like we would have developed that technology ourselves by now. But, on the flip side, we had math and civilization and indoor plumbing when the British were tribal people in the forest. No need to patronizingly give us credit for things we didn’t do.
- danharaj 7y ago
  > But would the Congolese have had electron microscopes but for Belgian colonialism? Belgian colonialism was particularly vicious and damaging. It is certain that its consequences extend to the present day.
- fredgrott 7y ago
  even by science standards, isolating the virus counts as discovery unfairly as some would look upon it not isolating the virus counts as failing to discover it. and that goes way back to the early 1800s
- mannykannot 7y ago
  I think you underestimate the significance of identifying the outbreak as something new. There is a strong tendency to fit our experiences into the framework of what we know, and education might even reinforce that tendency (while the health care professionals tried to explain it as a known disease, the villagers suspected there was something else going on.) The discovery was not complete at that point, but it did not begin with isolating the virus, either.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> He describes how the World Health Organization ordered them to give up the samples, to send them to England and eventually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, which was one of the only labs equipped to handle a deadly virus like Ebola. >He describes how angry that made him and Dr. Stefaan Pattyn, the man running the lab at the time, who died in 2008. The Belgian scientist Dr. Peter Piot comes across as a truly despicable character. By working with Ebola in a lab that was not equipped to handle such a deadly virus, he put thousands of people’s lives at risk. And the only reason he did it was for ego and career advancement. As mentioned in the article, the scientists at the CDC identified the virus around the same time as he did, so there was absolutely no benefit to anyone by him working with the virus except for his career.
mayneack 7y ago
"The Coming Plague" is a book from 1994 that gave him plenty of credit. I read it a long time ago, but definitely remember it talking about him. It focuses on "virus hunters" from the CDC/WHO that tracked down a lot of these emerging diseases in the field. I highly recommend it. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1995/08/ebola-africa-outbreak https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1995/08/ebola-africa-outbrea... https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance-ebook/dp/B005FGR6RO https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  One of the scariest books I've ever read. Still recommended.
vtantia 7y ago
Does the article mean credit in the part of the world influenced by the Western media?

370 points by respinal 7y ago

On the one hand, this is the classic story of colonialism: that the "winners" write the history books. There are likely thousands of stories like this, not the least of which in the woefully exploited African continent. On the other hand, "discovery" is a nebulous term, and plenty of discoveries have inconclusive origins. Why would we call this doctor the discoverer and not the first hospital workers to encounter the disease? Neither knew what it was, both groups thought it something new. Same with the Belgian researcher, (contestedly) named the discoverer. Identifying a disease is the kind of thing that's not going to come from one cook in the kitchen. I'm glad this guy is getting recognition, it sounds like he's a noble person who played a critical role in uncovering Ebola and leading to its present level of controllability. Most philosophical and scientific concepts have concurrent or disparate discoverers or inventors. And even those that don't have borrowed so much from precedent that you can often make the case the discovery was previously made.

agumonkey 7y ago
Yes nothing is objective here. History is a double simplification. From the writer to the reader... Both decides to accept the summary.
_carl_jung 7y ago
We see the same thing in software. I've heard people answer "Grace Hopper", "Ada Lovelace", "Charles Babbage", "Alan Turing", etc. to the same question about the origin of computers. The real thing is the question needs to be more specific. Is it the origin of programmable computers? The origin of programming itself? The origin of non-programmable computers? And so on. I'm no epidemiologist, but I imagine something similar is at work here. As you say, different people performed different key roles in the whole process which constitutes "discovery" of Ebola.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  > I've heard people answer "Grace Hopper", "Ada Lovelace", "Charles Babbage", "Alan Turing", etc. to the same question about the origin of computers. You forgot Gottfried W. Leibniz. Another question is its historical impacts: did it have any influence on its further development? A good account of history should document and analyze them from different perspectives. You can have the credit of being the "first" even it doesn't have much influence, and you can have the credit of being influential even it doesn't have much publicity. And often the story is not black-and-white. For example, we can say Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed and conclude that it has no influence on its further design. But we you know that the story of Charles Babbage helped Howard Aiken at IBM selling his machine? (Harvard Mark I).
  - emmelaich 7y ago
    I thought of Leibniz too. > "In Leibniz's mind, “this language will be the greatest instrument of reason,” for “when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, and see who is right”"
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  3 of those 4 just seem... plain wrong? The first design of a general-purpose computer was obviously Babbage's. Wikipedia says work on it started in 1833, after the difference engine (already completed by 1822). He even developed two dozen programs for it between 1837-1840. He just ran into funding issues for his projects. Now if for some reason you feel an urge to hold an external issue like the lack of funding against him when giving credit, then you'd give credit to Konrad Zuse's Z3 (1941) for the first completed implementation. The fact that most computer scientists haven't even heard his name is evidence enough in my eyes that that's a thin rope to hang onto, but whatever. Beyond that, I find mention of those 3 other people just bizarre. If the person who actually produced the first design for a computer started its implementation doesn't get the credit, and the person who finally built the first one doesn't get the credit either... then are you sure your credit criteria are actually reasonable?!
  - 7y ago
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
I agree. A classic example is the story of the semiconductor and radio. The popular history said that the point-contact transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs and started the age of semiconductors. But do you know that Russian physicist Oleg Losev (also a pioneer of LED) discovered negative resistance in zinc-oxide diodes in 1923, and built solid-state amplifiers, oscillators, regenerative and superheterodyne radio receivers, 25 years before the transistor, but starved to death in the hunger during Nazi Germany's invasion and forgotten? And do you know that at the same year, 1923, American physicist J. Edgar Lilienfeld (also a pioneer of electrolytic capacitor), invented the first prototype of the Field-Effect Transistor, but due to technical limitations and his failure to publizie his researches in big-name journals, remained unknown for a long time? At the end of the day, I think some simplification and ignorance is acceptable in entry-level/popular history books, but in more advanced-level history books, all the known co-inventors/co-discoverers who have made contributions deserve a mention. Wikipedia has a good "list of multiple discoveries". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
- wbl 7y ago
  Negative resistance devices are very tricky to use since you need a non reciprocal element. Bell created a design that was commercially useful and widely applicable and later iterations (contact, planar BJT) cam from it.
  - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
    > Negative resistance devices are very tricky to use Sure... I'm not an engineer, but I read that tunnel diodes were hailed as the greatest innovation in semiconductor of the 1960s, and it was often the only available option in high-frequency applications, but they were almost completely abandoned when integrated circuits became feasible. Leaving the embarrassing situation that the tunnel diodes in lot of vintage Tektronix oscilloscopes are unobtainium. > Bell created a design that was commercially useful and widely applicable This is kind of the point made by the original comment. Arguing about the "first" sometimes is a waste of time, it's better to list all the codiscoverers and discuss their respective contributions.
Merrill 7y ago
Priority is a big deal for academic researchers, the people who write journal articles and books. When I worked in development, organization was formal and collaborations were informal. People shared ideas and exactly who thought up what wasn't too important. Overall performance mattered more. Documents that were published were only circulated internally. Patents were sometimes applied for, but inventorship was settled informally. After I transferred to research I was struck by how important priority of ideas became. Organization was informal but collaborations became formal. Who was principle investigator was very important. Publications were external and who's name appeared in what order was very important. Patents were fought over. Even in an industrial research lab it got pretty weird. I can only imagine how it is at a place like CDC. Being first author on a paper describing a new disease probably makes your career.
johnmarinelli 7y ago
The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola, but I think this only perpetuates and helps internalise colonialism. I think a more clear cut case on the issue how the music industry ripped off Chuck Berry and repackaged him as Elvis Presley. The more we ignore and "justify" the issue with intellectualism, the farther away we all get from a real solution.
- dmix 7y ago
  There's countless examples of this phenomenon happening while having nothing to do with 'colonialism', blaming that as the primary cause that needs to be addressed seems like selective reasoning. Even AIDs was "co-discovered" (meaning first to identify it as a retrovirus and published in a paper) by a team in France and one in the US around the same time, and only the French team got a nobel prize 25yrs later which was controversial for similar reasons that it's a difficult thing to identify (also note it takes a long time to get this sort of credit). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier
- nkozyra 7y ago
  > The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola I agree and addressed that. I don't disagree that colonialism's dark past plays a significant role in these things, but my larger point is "discovery" is always a hotly contested concept. I'm certainly not attempting to justify or mitigate it, that's specifically the reason I talked about colonialism first. It's important to frame much of our present day as being in the shadow of 19th and 20th century European exploitation abroad.
- throw_m239339 7y ago
  It has absolutely nothing to do with "colonialism" as an intersectional buzzword. People take credit for other people's discoveries all the time(Edison for instance), and in this article this isn't even the case. The person who actually identified the virus "ebola" isn't the black guy that took blood samples of infected patients. Saying otherwise is rewriting history to fit an intersectional narrative, which is no better than what you call colonial mentality. Should teams get credit for discoveries instead of individuals? Sure and both people should get recognition. But let's not be hyperbolic here or claim this is the result of "colonialism", whatever it means in the mouth of people who use that word out of context. I'm baffled as to how some people always fall for that old intersectional shtick of claiming there is racism,sexism,colonialism everywhere and in everything, just because someone says so. It completely weakens the meaning of these words and turn them into insignificant weasel words because after all they apply to anything...
Iv 7y ago
Ironically, the person credited for that was a Belgian who felt he was bullied by British into giving up the analysis to them. It is contempt all the way up. "[Pattyn] claimed that we needed a few more days to ready it for transport," Piot wrote. "So we kept a few tubes of VERO cells, as well as some of the newborn mice, which were dying. Perhaps it was a stubborn rebellion against the whole Belgian history of constantly being forced to grovel to a greater power. That material was just too valuable, too glorious to let it go."
vanderZwan 7y ago
Your argument is valid, but I would like to point out that without context it reads as if the article and the Congolese doctor in question do not acknowledge this. However, they do: > The discovery, says Muyembe, was thanks to a "consortium of research." But Google "Who discovered Ebola?" and you get a bunch of names — all of them white Western males. Dr. Jean Jacques Muyembe has been written out of history. "Yes, but it is ..." he pauses. He takes a breath and laughs, looking for the right way to respond. "Yes. It is not correct," he says. "It is not correct." ... and since the internet is full of people who love to comment on articles without actually reading them I think that is worth explicitly mentioning here. (to be clear: not a slight against your comment)
- nkozyra 7y ago
  I read the article, I thought it was a point worth addressing in more depth and HN has a rule specifically against this type of comment.
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that you did not read the article - it was clear to me that you did. To clarify: your point is valid and nuanced. I have just noticed both here and elsewhere that it is very common for people to read the comments first and react there without reading the article. So I was picturing the scenario where one would open this discussion, see your top comment, and go off on speculative discussions that are already addressed by the article in question.

lbj 7y ago

How is this valuable to hackers?

vwuon 7y ago
A black person felt bad and you're asking this? Just how heartless and vile can you be?

drk23 7y ago

Yea, reading the story, its bullsh as expected. He did not discover Ebola. It was the idiot tasked to get blood samples in some far away jungle. If he "discoverd" ebola, why he, not patient 0? That really stretches the meaning of "discover". But well, what do i know, he IS black after all.

thombat 7y ago
We must have read different stories. The one I read was about Jean-Jacques Muyembe, PhD in microbiology, who elected to return to his homeland to work as an epidemiologist, and when called to a disease outbreak recognised it as something novel and arranged for blood samples to be sent to a Belgian lab.
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  Well his contribution then was recognizing that it probably was not yellow fever, typhoid or malaria and that is was very deadly. If some other doctor (that happened to be white) with better equipment was the first to really see what was going on... How is that colonial racism or anything? It's just how things were, to the western doctors Muyembe really was just someone that happened to take the blood samples. But you know what is actually toxic national pride? This: > "He decided that all of the blood samples collected during this Ebola epidemic will stay in Congo. Anyone who wants to study this outbreak will have to come to his institute. ... But Piot says the decision was obviously made because of how African scientists have been treated. " Hindering scientific progress that could help his very own people out of spite and revenge!
  - mcv 7y ago
    It could also help his own people if they got recognition for their part, and the resources that come with that. Wasn't the fact that he did not have access to the equipment he needed, itself a sign of colonial racism? And yeah, chances are that if a white doctor had made the same discovery, they would have been credited with the discovery.

ecmascript 7y ago

This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery. Seems like a very dishonest piece of article and I doubt this article paints a fair view of how things actually were. The article could pretty much be summed up by "white scientist = bad, black scientist = good". With that being said, I am sure a case could be made that he should have been given more attention and credit but so should everyone who helped in the beginning. What about all the nameless nurses etc? If this isn't NPC think, I don't know what is.

dm3730 7y ago
> This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery. Which article did you read? Because the article linked in above explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism. People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point. It is nice to see that Peter was able to get past his prejudice, better late than never. " When asked if he feels responsible for writing Muyembe out of history, Piot pauses. "I think that's a fair comment," he says. "But my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience." " Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.
- rukittenme 7y ago
  > People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point. > [The article] explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism. Uhhhh.... lol. A strict reading of the article would reveal that Piot never admits to racism (on his part) and admits to no attempt to "write out Muyembe". Piot accuses others of being racist (those same others he admitted to harboring resentment for) but without evidence his claims are as valid as Muyembe. I mean really... how are you going to accuse TWO PEOPLE of racism when you lack the ability to read four sentences.

denzil_correa 7y ago

The core of the article is the following summary from Dr. Peter Piot the scientist credited for the Ebola discovery. > Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.

chirau 7y ago

What's new here? As an African myself I am not surprised at all. History favors its author. Explorer David Livingstone is credited with discovering the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Despite the multitude of accounts and documentation of the locals' Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) prior to his arrival. But hey, according to history it seems the locals had never encountered a waterfall a mile wide and hundreds of meters deep whose plunge creates a mini eternal rainforest in the area and the plunge can be heard from a distance away out of sight of the falls themselves. But yes, it was David Livingstone who "discovered" the falls. Oh, did I mention that from his own account, he was escorted by locals to the falls?

account73466 7y ago
Not in the current version of history, see from Wikipedia: "On this leg he became the first European to see the Mosi-o-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders") waterfall, which he named Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria."
- mcv 7y ago
  Wikipedia is a good vehicle for correcting this excessively Eurocentric view of history. It's editable to anyone in the world, and it has always put effort into support all countries and all languages (even some fairly obscure ones). And it's used by everybody across the world. That makes it a great tool for teaching Europeans a bit about the rest of the world. Unlike most western encyclopedias, it's not just written by Europeans and Americans.
jlawson 7y ago
Last week I discovered a wonderful sushi restaurant near my work. I told my work friends about it and now we all love it. It doesn't mean nobody in the world knew about that sushi restaurant before me. It means nobody in my group knew about it, nobody told me, and I found it by personal experience, and shared the information among my community. So yes, David Livingstone discovered the falls. We don't constantly have to try to degrade the contributions that western people made to the world just because they're white. Livingstone made huge sacrifices to push on where almost everyone else gave up and he linked together pathways of information that didn't exist before. He did the exploring; he took the risk; he should get credit _for those efforts and sacrifices_ as should the people who sent him. Its ridiculous to try to equate his achievement with the people who were simply born in the areas he explored and lived there as their default state of traditional existence.

belorn 7y ago

In diving there is a repeating patter of wrecks being discovered and rediscovered which usually follow the same pattern. A researcher is looking for a famous wreck and locate local fishermen who says they know where it is. They go there, find the wreck, write about it in a journal, and then it get forgotten. A new researcher goes and look for the same wreck and again goes to local fishermen who points the researcher to the wreck, a book get written and the wreck get named after the now official discoverer.

mikorym 7y ago

Altohugh I am not particularly upset about it, South African scientists have often not gotten recognition and even the white males ones! [1] [2] I think the discrimination is worse in a way than described in the article. But maybe that touches even on the philosophy of individual recognition itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard#First_human-to-human_heart_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard#First_human.... I've been told that in particular, the USA was not keen of giving someone outside of the US recognition for the first heart transplant. And somewhat ironically, Chris Barnard's brother that was part of the team, Marius, did not get recognition (but that may have been due to his less extravagant personality). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Barnard_(surgeon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Barnard_(surgeon) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_transplant From what I understand, the US was again hesitant to cede to South Africa, instead stressing the first "penis and scrotum" transplant.

mikorym 7y ago
* although

finnthehuman 7y ago

People not getting proper credit is the norm, not the exception. I'm always suspicious of articles like this. They're written like the public record is mostly right and correcting this one inaccuracy was an important contribution. But the public record is silent on most things and of questionable accuracy on the rest. My professional experience is that people not caring about external attention and credit is the default. And people seeking that external validation and/or press attention don't care about getting the boundaries right, they care about getting as many sales or as much adulation as possible. There is a parallel within organizations: either management knows how to reward people without them making sure their name is on things, or they don't and people try to get their name on everything regardless of their contribution. And that's just the groundwork before we get to the fact the press rarely operates at a level above functional illiteracy for anything that takes domain knowledge.

Alinax 7y ago

A lot of people seem to be out of their depth attributing to malice what can be simple stupidity or different sets of prioritization. Here is a few things to consider as you may be attempting to build a 'colonialism or racism' tone to your perspective: [IF YOU BELIEVE I AM WRONG, I WOULD BE HAPPY TO CHANGE MY MIND OR DISCUSS THE MATTER INSTEAD OF UP/DOWN VOTES] * Did Dr. Piot think of colonialism when the WHO thought that the UK and US were better equipped to handle this new discovery? * What if a more junior doctor in Muyembe's team made the conclusion and Muyembe used his position in power to get the vial to Europe? * Should you as a researcher/doctor hold a discovery back for a few days/weeks/years and let people die for the sake of your name being put on it? * What constitutes a discovery in such case? Concluding it might be something different and moving it forward or doing the lab work to figure out what it is? What not both? Should the treatment be considered a discovery? Should Muyembe add the name of all the people that came before him that provided the tools/knowledge to arrive at the treatment? * Should Eyder Peralta (writer of the post) and NPR (an American news company) be seeing as anti-colonialist? * Do country X attribute their success in part to other countries who gave them aid to get infrastructure, training , goods & services they need?

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
"Did Dr. Piot think of colonialism when the WHO thought that the UK and US were better equipped to handle this new discovery?" But Dr. Piot himself he intentionally left out the pepole who provided him with the evidence to make his claims, who themselves made the claims he was merely confirming.

rayiner 7y ago

> He took blood samples before she died and sent them to Belgium, where they had an electron microscope to try to identify the culprit. Scientists there and in the United States saw this was a new virus that caused hemorrhagic fever. I think the whole thing is more complicated than the article makes it out to be. Clearly, Muyembe should get credit for the field epidemiology and recognizing that this could be something new. But can you say, as the article does, that someone “discovered” Ebola if they didn’t isolate the virus that causes it? Now you can argue the reason Muyembe couldn’t isolate the virus was because of colonialism and the Congolese government not being able to afford an expensive piece of equipment like an electron microscope. But would the Congolese have had electron microscopes but for Belgian colonialism? I mean, there is a great story here even without the sensationalism. Man from Congo gets a PhD in Belgium, goes back home to help his country, but is held back by lack of local resources. What does Belgium owe in terms of equipping it’s former colony to help themselves? There is good material there. As someone from a poor former colony myself, I find the whole thing somewhat patronizing. Bangladeshis rely on European and American geneticists to develop GMO rice to feed the country. But if the British hadn’t colonized us, it’s not like we would have developed that technology ourselves by now. But, on the flip side, we had math and civilization and indoor plumbing when the British were tribal people in the forest. No need to patronizingly give us credit for things we didn’t do.

danharaj 7y ago
> But would the Congolese have had electron microscopes but for Belgian colonialism? Belgian colonialism was particularly vicious and damaging. It is certain that its consequences extend to the present day.
fredgrott 7y ago
even by science standards, isolating the virus counts as discovery unfairly as some would look upon it not isolating the virus counts as failing to discover it. and that goes way back to the early 1800s
mannykannot 7y ago
I think you underestimate the significance of identifying the outbreak as something new. There is a strong tendency to fit our experiences into the framework of what we know, and education might even reinforce that tendency (while the health care professionals tried to explain it as a known disease, the villagers suspected there was something else going on.) The discovery was not complete at that point, but it did not begin with isolating the virus, either.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> He describes how the World Health Organization ordered them to give up the samples, to send them to England and eventually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, which was one of the only labs equipped to handle a deadly virus like Ebola. >He describes how angry that made him and Dr. Stefaan Pattyn, the man running the lab at the time, who died in 2008. The Belgian scientist Dr. Peter Piot comes across as a truly despicable character. By working with Ebola in a lab that was not equipped to handle such a deadly virus, he put thousands of people’s lives at risk. And the only reason he did it was for ego and career advancement. As mentioned in the article, the scientists at the CDC identified the virus around the same time as he did, so there was absolutely no benefit to anyone by him working with the virus except for his career.

mayneack 7y ago

"The Coming Plague" is a book from 1994 that gave him plenty of credit. I read it a long time ago, but definitely remember it talking about him. It focuses on "virus hunters" from the CDC/WHO that tracked down a lot of these emerging diseases in the field. I highly recommend it. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1995/08/ebola-africa-outbreak https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1995/08/ebola-africa-outbrea... https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance-ebook/dp/B005FGR6RO https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...

jacquesm 7y ago
One of the scariest books I've ever read. Still recommended.

vtantia 7y ago

Does the article mean credit in the part of the world influenced by the Western media?