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

#51

Post by fzeroracer » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

throw_m239339 wrote: post #40

johnmarinelli wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Let's not mince words here. The person who recognized Ebola and thought it was worth analyzing is a man who holds a phd in virology in microbiology and to this day contributes and advises on Ebola research. Saying he's essentially just a black guy (or an idiot, as another comment here did) is massively downplaying who he is and what he does.

He identified Ebola by being aware that it was different from other diseases he had dealt with and sent it off to a lab for further examination. By your argument the only people that would ever get credit are the people in the labs, not the people doing fieldwork and recognizing new diseases as they appear.

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

#52

Post by pflats » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #26

_carl_jung wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see the same thing in software. I've heard people answer "Grace Hopper", "Ada Lovelace", "Charles Babbage", "Alan Turing", etc. to the same question about the origin of computers. 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 s…

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 again…

I don't think they're particularly hard arguments to make.

Turing is the easiest:

What is a computer? What isn't a computer? If you can't answer that question, you don't have a computer. The Church-Turing thesis is the invention of the computer.

Lovelace and Hopper are notable for paradigm shifts (as much as I hate the term) in what computers "are".

Lovelace invented computers because the essence of the computer is the ability to perform computations, not just calculations:

Lovelace published the first algorithm (Babbage obviously had to have written a few to design an analytical engine) and was the first person imagine computers as more than just a flexible calculator. In particular, she was the first to use a variable to represent anything beyond the intermediate/final step of a calculation: she was computing the 7th term of a series, so she used series/loop indices.

Hopper invented computers because a general-purpose computer is a computation machine with a human-friendly interface. A "smart" lightbulb that runs embedded linux isn't a "computer" (until modified).

Grace Hopper conceived of abstract programming in human-aligned languages, and invented A-0, the first "compiler" (her term; now we'd call it a linker). Before Hopper, computers were only ever programmed directly in machine code; every step of a computer program was a specific operation. Before A-0, we just had computation machines, but no human-centered interface. After A-0, we had computers.

Zuse would be a perfectly excellent 5th name, as would Church, Godel, Herbrand, Bohm, and many others.

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

#53

Post by jhall1468 » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

pflats wrote: post #52

mehrdadn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 again…

I don't think they're particularly hard arguments to make. Turing is the easiest: What is a computer? What isn't a computer? If you can't answer that question, you don't have a computer. The Church-Turing thesis is the invention of the computer. Lovelace and Hopper are notable for paradigm shifts (as much as I hate the term) in what computers "are". Lovelace invented computers because the essence of the computer is t…

Turing is the easiest because he's the only one that makes any sense. You have to get incredibly philosophical to have Hopper or Lovelace on the list as they very obviously did not invented the computer.

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

#54

Post by fredgrott » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:00 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #46

> He took blood samples before she died and sent them to Belgium, where they had an electron microscope to try to identify the culprit. Scientists there and in the United States saw this was a new virus that caused hemorrhagic fever. I think the whole thing is more complicated than the article makes it out to be. Clearly, Muyembe should get credit for the field epidemiology and recognizing that this could be somethin…

even by science standards, isolating the virus counts as discovery unfairly as some would look upon it not isolating the virus counts as failing to discover it. and that goes way back to the early 1800s

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

#55

Post by mannykannot » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #46

> He took blood samples before she died and sent them to Belgium, where they had an electron microscope to try to identify the culprit. Scientists there and in the United States saw this was a new virus that caused hemorrhagic fever. I think the whole thing is more complicated than the article makes it out to be. Clearly, Muyembe should get credit for the field epidemiology and recognizing that this could be somethin…

I think you underestimate the significance of identifying the outbreak as something new. There is a strong tendency to fit our experiences into the framework of what we know, and education might even reinforce that tendency (while the health care professionals tried to explain it as a known disease, the villagers suspected there was something else going on.)

The discovery was not complete at that point, but it did not begin with isolating the virus, either.

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

#56

Post by skybrian » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #46

> He took blood samples before she died and sent them to Belgium, where they had an electron microscope to try to identify the culprit. Scientists there and in the United States saw this was a new virus that caused hemorrhagic fever. I think the whole thing is more complicated than the article makes it out to be. Clearly, Muyembe should get credit for the field epidemiology and recognizing that this could be somethin…

At an abstract level, ignoring the politics, it seems like this is a story of successful international scientific collaboration. Some countries have more scientific resources than others, often for bad historical reasons. Working together to achieve important scientific goals still seems like a good response to that?

But scientists are people too and there can be conflicts over who does the work and who gets the credit. This is fundamentally political, where people have conflicting interests and somehow need to make a decision anyway.

Such decisions might be made based on scientific ideals and practical considerations, but compensating the people who lose in a political fight is still important. Telling their story is certainly part of that. Maybe there should be other compensation too?

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

#57

Post by rukittenme » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

dm3730 wrote: post #10

ecmascript wrote: post #8

This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery. 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…

> This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery. 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…

> People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point.

> [The article] explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism.

Uhhhh.... lol.

A strict reading of the article would reveal that Piot never admits to racism (on his part) and admits to no attempt to "write out Muyembe".

Piot accuses others of being racist (those same others he admitted to harboring resentment for) but without evidence his claims are as valid as Muyembe.

I mean really... how are you going to accuse TWO PEOPLE of racism when you lack the ability to read four sentences.

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

#58

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

> He describes how the World Health Organization ordered them to give up the samples, to send them to England and eventually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, which was one of the only labs equipped to handle a deadly virus like Ebola.

>He describes how angry that made him and Dr. Stefaan Pattyn, the man running the lab at the time, who died in 2008.

The Belgian scientist Dr. Peter Piot comes across as a truly despicable character. By working with Ebola in a lab that was not equipped to handle such a deadly virus, he put thousands of people’s lives at risk. And the only reason he did it was for ego and career advancement. As mentioned in the article, the scientists at the CDC identified the virus around the same time as he did, so there was absolutely no benefit to anyone by him working with the virus except for his career.

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

#59

Post by mayneack » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

"The Coming Plague" is a book from 1994 that gave him plenty of credit. I read it a long time ago, but definitely remember it talking about him. It focuses on "virus hunters" from the CDC/WHO that tracked down a lot of these emerging diseases in the field. I highly recommend it.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1995/08/ebola-africa-outbrea...

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...

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

#60

Post by ZeikJT » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

jhall1468 wrote: post #53

pflats wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're particularly hard arguments to make. Turing is the easiest: What is a computer? What isn't a computer? If you can't answer that question, you don't have a computer. The Church-Turing thesis is the invention of the computer. Lovelace and Hopper are notable for paradigm shifts (as much as I hate the term) in what computers "are". Lovelace invented computers because the essence of the computer is t…

Turing is the easiest because he's the only one that makes any sense. You have to get incredibly philosophical to have Hopper or Lovelace on the list as they very obviously did not invented the computer.

I implore you to read about the origins of the word computer and who those people were and what they did. Also just in general about the Analytical Engine, Babbage, and Lovelace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Etymology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(job_description)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#First_computing_devic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program#Analytical_En...