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

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.

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.

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.

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.