4 ms·

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

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?!
  - _carl_jung 7y ago
    I suppose most of the people I have heard these names from are not in the same league as you. I appreciate this summary though thanks. I also regret my sarcasm, sorry.
  - pflats 7y ago
    I don't think they're particularly hard arguments to make. Turing is the easiest: What is a computer? What isn't a computer? If you can't answer that question, you don't have a computer. The Church-Turing thesis is the invention of the computer. Lovelace and Hopper are notable for paradigm shifts (as much as I hate the term) in what computers "are". Lovelace invented computers because the essence of the computer is the ability to perform computations, not just calculations: Lovelace published the first algorithm (Babbage obviously had to have written a few to design an analytical engine) and was the first person imagine computers as more than just a flexible calculator. In particular, she was the first to use a variable to represent anything beyond the intermediate/final step of a calculation: she was computing the 7th term of a series, so she used series/loop indices. Hopper invented computers because a general-purpose computer is a computation machine with a human-friendly interface. A "smart" lightbulb that runs embedded linux isn't a "computer" (until modified). Grace Hopper conceived of abstract programming in human-aligned languages, and invented A-0, the first "compiler" (her term; now we'd call it a linker). Before Hopper, computers were only ever programmed directly in machine code; every step of a computer program was a specific operation. Before A-0, we just had computation machines, but no human-centered interface. After A-0, we had computers. Zuse would be a perfectly excellent 5th name, as would Church, Godel, Herbrand, Bohm, and many others.
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.

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?!
- _carl_jung 7y ago
  I suppose most of the people I have heard these names from are not in the same league as you. I appreciate this summary though thanks. I also regret my sarcasm, sorry.
- pflats 7y ago
  I don't think they're particularly hard arguments to make. Turing is the easiest: What is a computer? What isn't a computer? If you can't answer that question, you don't have a computer. The Church-Turing thesis is the invention of the computer. Lovelace and Hopper are notable for paradigm shifts (as much as I hate the term) in what computers "are". Lovelace invented computers because the essence of the computer is the ability to perform computations, not just calculations: Lovelace published the first algorithm (Babbage obviously had to have written a few to design an analytical engine) and was the first person imagine computers as more than just a flexible calculator. In particular, she was the first to use a variable to represent anything beyond the intermediate/final step of a calculation: she was computing the 7th term of a series, so she used series/loop indices. Hopper invented computers because a general-purpose computer is a computation machine with a human-friendly interface. A "smart" lightbulb that runs embedded linux isn't a "computer" (until modified). Grace Hopper conceived of abstract programming in human-aligned languages, and invented A-0, the first "compiler" (her term; now we'd call it a linker). Before Hopper, computers were only ever programmed directly in machine code; every step of a computer program was a specific operation. Before A-0, we just had computation machines, but no human-centered interface. After A-0, we had computers. Zuse would be a perfectly excellent 5th name, as would Church, Godel, Herbrand, Bohm, and many others.

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.