Congolese doctor discovered Ebola, but didn't get credit until now • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by segfaultbuserr » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

wbl wrote: post #27

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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.

> 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.

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

#32

Post by mikorym » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 12:55 PM UTC

Altohugh I am not particularly upset about it, South African scientists have often not gotten recognition and even the white males ones! [1] [2] I think the discrimination is worse in a way than described in the article. But maybe that touches even on the philosophy of individual recognition itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard#First_human.... I've been told that in particular, the USA was not keen of giving someone outside of the US recognition for the first heart transplant. And somewhat ironically, Chris Barnard's brother that was part of the team, Marius, did not get recognition (but that may have been due to his less extravagant personality). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Barnard_(surgeon)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_transplant From what I understand, the US was again hesitant to cede to South Africa, instead stressing the first "penis and scrotum" transplant.

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

#33

Post by watwut » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #19

chirau wrote: post #12

What's new here? As an African myself I am not surprised at all. History favors its author. Explorer David Livingstone is credited with discovering the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Despite the multitude of accounts and documentation of the locals' Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) prior to his arrival. But hey, according to history it seems the locals had never encountered a waterfall a mile wide and hundreds of…

In 2004, Somoto canyon in Nicaragua was ‘discovered’ by Czech scientists despite the fact that it’s surrounded by farmland and has a fairly large stream/river running through the middle of it. Locals were well aware it was there.

Those two stories are different. One is being first Czech who found it for "western civilization" despite farmland of unrelated people being there. Another is receiving blood samples from someone and leaving that someone out of story, because quoting Piot who ended up having credit "at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded".

Moreover it has consequences: "During this outbreak, Muyembe has also made a decision many thought unthinkable even a few years ago. 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. American scientists, who have led the way in studying Ebola, have privately expressed frustrations. But Piot says the decision was obviously made because of how African scientists have been treated. Western scientists, he says, should get over it."

I think that when you are making the "local farmers" assumption, you are assuming that Muyembe did not had the "real" involvement in research as Piot. There is no reason to assume that.

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

#34

Post by finnthehuman » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

People not getting proper credit is the norm, not the exception. I'm always suspicious of articles like this. They're written like the public record is mostly right and correcting this one inaccuracy was an important contribution. But the public record is silent on most things and of questionable accuracy on the rest.

My professional experience is that people not caring about external attention and credit is the default. And people seeking that external validation and/or press attention don't care about getting the boundaries right, they care about getting as many sales or as much adulation as possible. There is a parallel within organizations: either management knows how to reward people without them making sure their name is on things, or they don't and people try to get their name on everything regardless of their contribution.

And that's just the groundwork before we get to the fact the press rarely operates at a level above functional illiteracy for anything that takes domain knowledge.

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

#35

Post by mcv » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

account73466 wrote: post #13

chirau wrote: post #12

What's new here? As an African myself I am not surprised at all. History favors its author. Explorer David Livingstone is credited with discovering the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Despite the multitude of accounts and documentation of the locals' Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) prior to his arrival. But hey, according to history it seems the locals had never encountered a waterfall a mile wide and hundreds of…

Not in the current version of history, see from Wikipedia: "On this leg he became the first European to see the Mosi-o-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders") waterfall, which he named Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria."

Wikipedia is a good vehicle for correcting this excessively Eurocentric view of history. It's editable to anyone in the world, and it has always put effort into support all countries and all languages (even some fairly obscure ones). And it's used by everybody across the world. That makes it a great tool for teaching Europeans a bit about the rest of the world. Unlike most western encyclopedias, it's not just written by Europeans and Americans.

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

#36

Post by dmix » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

johnmarinelli wrote: post #28

nkozyra wrote: post #2

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…

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…

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

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

#37

Post by dmix » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

miracle2k wrote: post #16

chirau wrote: post #12

What's new here? As an African myself I am not surprised at all. History favors its author. Explorer David Livingstone is credited with discovering the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Despite the multitude of accounts and documentation of the locals' Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) prior to his arrival. But hey, according to history it seems the locals had never encountered a waterfall a mile wide and hundreds of…

That's similar to the argument you sometimes hear that Columbus didn't discover America - people already lived there. But from the perspective of Europeans, he certainly did. Similarly, it's not surprising you can "discover" a waterfall if you live right beside it. Surely, humankind can legitimately claim to discover a planet, even if an alien race might have done so before us. What is maybe fair is to ask in whose n…

Typically for Nobel prizes it's the person who wrote the paper who played the biggest role in early correct identification of the source and causes combined with spreading that in the wider scientific community, it's not merely who recognized it as a unique disease or simply studied it first.

The bar is simply higher and what's being awarded and therefore incentivized is the science part (which includes communication) not simply the discovery.

People running around trying to be the first to label it in their personal diary or in a local community isn't what is being incentivized.

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

#38

Post by mcv » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

Double_a_92 wrote: post #24

thombat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must have read different stories. The one I read was about Jean-Jacques Muyembe, PhD in microbiology, who elected to return to his homeland to work as an epidemiologist, and when called to a disease outbreak recognised it as something novel and arranged for blood samples to be sent to a Belgian lab.

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 yo…

It could also help his own people if they got recognition for their part, and the resources that come with that. Wasn't the fact that he did not have access to the equipment he needed, itself a sign of colonial racism?

And yeah, chances are that if a white doctor had made the same discovery, they would have been credited with the discovery.

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

#39

Post by nkozyra » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

johnmarinelli wrote: post #28

nkozyra wrote: post #2

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…

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…

> 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.

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

#40

Post by throw_m239339 » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

johnmarinelli wrote: post #28

nkozyra wrote: post #2

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…

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…

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...