Scientists Who Discovered Ebola Almost Caused A Disaster: 'It Makes Me Wince Just To Think Of It'

This is the team that first went looking for the source of the Ebola virus in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Piot is the third from the left in the middle row, wearing the colourful shirt.

When Ebola first arrived in Europe on September 29, 1976, the vials of the virus were carried from Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in a shiny blue thermos on a passenger flight.


Three lab workers in Antwerp, Belgium, received the thermos and prepared to open it on a lab bench. The precautions they took and the room they were in were appropriate for handling organisms like salmonella or tuberculosis, with none of the security procedures or body suits that we now associate with manipulating Biosafety Level 4 pathogens like Ebola.

All the lab team knew was that they were receiving blood samples from an unusual epidemic that was suspected to possibly be some form of "yellow fever with hemorrhagic manifestations," according to Peter Piot, one of the three in the room and a co-discoverer of the Ebola virus. Piot wrote about the experience in his book "No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses."

Wearing latex gloves and no other protection, they opened the cheap plastic thermos that was supposed to hold two glass vials of blood that had been drawn from a Flemish nun who was too sick to be evacuated from the Congo.

One of the vials was broken — the thermos hadn't been stored carefully enough on the passenger plane that carried it from Kinshasa.

This photo from 1976 shows one of the Flemish nuns from the mission in Zaire looking at graves of colleagues and patients who died in that Ebola outbreak.

Blood and broken glass mixed with half melted ice. Piot, who was a 27-year-old medical school graduate and junior lab worker at the time, describes that moment:

We didn't even imagine the risk we were taking. Indeed, shipping those blood samples in a simple thermos, without any kind of precaution, was an incredibly perilous act. Maybe the world was a simpler, more innocent place in those days, or maybe it was just a lot more reckless.

If they had any idea what Ebola was at the time, it would have been shipped to one of the three non-Soviet labs that were considered able to handle hemorrhagic viruses. But since the team had no idea of exactly what they had received, Piot's two co-workers, postdoc student René Delgadillo and Guido Van Der Groen, reached into the soupy viral mess and picked out the intact vial.

"It makes me wince just to think of it," Piot writes.

To isolate the virus, the three — still maskless and with no protection but gloves — injected the blood into cell cultures and into the brains of adult and baby mice ("I never liked this aspect of the work," Piot writes).

They tested the blood, cell cultures, and mice over the next several days for known hemorrhagic diseases like yellow fever and Lassa fever, but antibodies for those diseases never turned up. Their boss, Stefaan Pattyn, looked into the epidemic itself, and found a village called Yambuku that seemed to be the origin.

The Flemish nun had died on September 30, and pieces of her liver were flown to Belgium on yet another passenger flight.