How we discovered Ebola virus

How we discovered Ebola virus


It was October 1976 in Atlanta, and a disease that no one had ever seen was coming into focus. Word came from an amateur radio network in Africa that the mystery illness had killed hundreds of people in just over a month. The chief of the viral pathology branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was standing over an electron microscope. Dr. Frederick Murphy, now a professor of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was the first to see this unknown killer up close.

The virus would eventually be named after a river in then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Dr. Murphy recalled his first encounter with Ebola, why it scared him and what might be done to control the current outbreak in West Africa. Here is an edited and condensed version of his conversation with The New York Times.

What was your first thought when the Ebola virus came into focus on Oct. 13, 1976?

That day remains very vivid in my memory. It raised the hair on the back of my neck, the first image. I was the only one left at the C.D.C. who had worked with the Marburg virus in 1967. And the two viruses look alike. I was pretty sure it was Marburg, which was bad enough, but by the end of the day, we knew it was different.

Talk a little about Marburg and why that was so scary.

In 1967, Marburg virus appeared in Europe in several places that were processing monkey kidneys to make cell culture for things like the polio vaccine. The people started getting sick. Eventually seven people died. That was really the first high containment work we ever did at the C.D.C. We received the virus immediately from Germany and from Britain and went to work on it just to get the basics, so that the C.D.C. would be ready for whatever might happen.

It was another league of threat. This virus was incredibly lethal in monkeys. The pathology is dramatic. The shape of the virus is dramatic. There were so different — Ebola and Marburg — from all the little round viruses that people would otherwise think about. It really got our attention.

Why is shape so important?

They are actual filaments, just a flexible rod, and according to how they lay down, the shape will look different. If you look across the electron microscopic field, you see them in all different forms. I think there is something in that shape that is emotional or it strikes something fundamental in the way we think — not that all the other viruses are alike. The variety of shapes is quite amazing. But this was outside the frame of reference, it really just grabs you.

What did the first image of Ebola do to motivate the response to the outbreak?

To get back to Africa took more than a week of work. In the days from the time the box arrived from being shipped from Belgium to Atlanta, it was incredibly dramatic. The box was opened by my colleague Patricia Webb, and all of the vials were broken. Anyone else would have brought the box to the autoclave [for sterilization]. She put on a gown and mask and gloves and squeezed a bit of fluid out of the cotton batting, and put it into a cell culture with a lot of extra antibiotics to kill any bacteria that were in there. Within two days, the cells started to look sick. And she gave me a few drops of the cell culture, and I prepared that for the electron microscope.

In those days, you had to be able to grow the virus. There was no genetic identification possible. So it had to go into cell culture and laboratory animals to identify if a virus was even there. What Patricia Webb did was the basis for everything else that followed.

In those days, getting another box shipped was a big deal. Communication was very bad. There were no cell phones. Communication between people who were in Yambuku [at the heart of the outbreak] in Zaire was by ham radio network with amateur ham radio operators sending the signals on through several intermediate points to get the signal out of Africa. They were ham radio networks set in place to help missionary hospitals. Sounds like 100 years ago, doesn’t it?

You looked at the actual damage that the virus does. How does it affect the body?

First of all, the virus grows very quickly. There may be a weeklong period incubation period after infection. But then the course of the clinical infection is really dramatic. Just over a matter of days people get so very very sick. The pathologic side is that several organs are just destroyed by the virus, especially the liver. And the amount of virus present in the damaged liver is overwhelming. It may be the largest concentration of virus I’ve ever seen in one place.

Do we have any idea of how it gets there and how it proliferates?

It replicates in lymphoid tissues. It’s not just limited to the liver. It spreads through the body through the blood and causes damage in many places. There’s often a rash, and respiratory symptoms. There’s just so much damage occurring so quickly that it makes sense that this virus is so lethal.

That’s damage in humans and in some animals including monkeys and other laboratory animals, is that right?

Right. And yet, our present thinking is that the natural reservoir of Marburg and Ebola viruses are fruit bats in which the infection is silent.

Is there something about the virus itself that defies our scientific attempts to classify, treat and eradicate it?

For these kinds of viruses, we don’t even talk about eradication. If a virus is living in fruit bats in Africa, there are just no ideas about how you would even eradicate it. Prevention has to start at the place where humans get infected. How we are going to protect people across Africa is still a good question. We know enough about the natural history of the virus in nature. It pops up, goes away, comes back. But it comes back in a different place. It comes back as a different genetic strain. There’s still a lot of mystery.

Do you think the pace of scientific understanding increases during outbreaks like the one we are experiencing in West Africa right now?

As has happened over the years with Ebola outbreaks, scientists are sent to outbreak hot spots. But the first thing that has to happen is that the scientists have to take care of the sick people. Everybody chips in to help save lives and make patients more comfortable and to prevent more transmission. So the research comes way down the list. Maybe that’s why progress has been slow.

If you were Ebola, what would you think of your prospects right now?

The way we humans have dealt with the infectious disease boils down to only a few arrows in our quiver. We have vaccines. If the virus is transmitted by mosquitos, we can try to control them. In the old days, we had quarantine, which has become pretty passé. And we have few drugs. But against the viruses there are very few.

The real question would be, If we had a vaccine, how would we use it across Africa? Who is going to pay for it? We’re now seeing how hard it is to eradicate polio. We’re down to the last few places in the world where the polio virus is still present. And we have a very good vaccine. But it’s a complicated world out there. With polio, it’s expecting the end game, and with other diseases, you don’t even get started. There are still plenty of important diseases where we don’t have a vaccine. It’s not just Ebola.

How do we beat back the current outbreak?

It’s still the standout virus. If you’re going into the laboratory to work on the short list of the viruses that require the maximum containment — the labs with the space suits — you’re still most focused when you’re working with Ebola. It’s the one where you would least want to stick yourself with a needle. It’s the first virus I think about when I think about biocontainment in a lab.

And if you’re going to work in the field on the reservoir animals in Africa, you have to have all of the same kinds of biocontainment to protect yourself there. That’s what makes everything so expensive and complicated.

The third place where you need containment is in the hospitals and clinics in Africa right now. You realize that many of the people who have been infected and have died are medical care personnel. It’s a special kind of biosafety that needs to be improved.

Do you think that level of safety is even possible in West Africa right now?

The educational side of it is huge. And it’s more than just teaching people how to be careful. You have to provide all the equipment for people who have been trained to protect themselves. It’s these practical, on the ground, public health actions that limit transmission and then stop transmission. And that all starts with educating people.