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

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

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!

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?!

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.

Difference is that Muyembe sent blood samples to man who later had credit for discovery and acknowledges what happened:

> The man who gets the bulk of the credit for discovering Ebola is Dr. Peter Piot. At the time, he was a young microbiologist at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Belgium. He was the one to receive the blood samples sent by Muyembe. [...] When asked if he feels responsible for writing Muyembe out of history, Piot pauses. "I think that's a fair comment," he says. [...] 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.