As the first nun at Ngaliema Hospital, Sister M.E., lay dying, her doctors had decided to give her a so-called agonal biopsy. This is a rapid sampling of tissue, done close to the moment of death instead of a full autopsy. She was a member of a religious order that prohibited autopsies, but the doctors very much wanted to know what was replicating inside her. As the terminal shock and convulsions came over her, they inserted a needle into her upper abdomen and sucked out a quantity of liver. Her liver had begun to liquefy, and the needle was large. A fair amount of the nun’s liver traveled up the needle and filled a biopsy syringe. Possibly it was during this agonal biopsy that her blood squirted on the walls. The doctors also took some samples of blood from her arm and put it in glass tubes. The nun’s blood was precious beyond measure, since it contained the unknown hot agent.
The blood was flown to a national laboratory in Belgium and to the England natural laboratory, the Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down, in Wiltshire. Scientists at both labs began racing to identify the agent. Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia—the C.D.C.—scientists were feeling left out, and were still scrambling to get their hands on a little bit of the nun’s blood, making telephone calls to Africa and Europe, pleading for the samples.
There is a branch of the C.D.C. that deals with unknown emerging viruses. It’s called the Special Pathogens Branch. In 1976, at the time of the Zaire outbreak, the branch was being run by a doctor named Karl M. Johnson, a virus hunter whose home terrain had been the rain forests of Central and South America. (He is not related to Gene Johnson, the civilian virus hunter, or to Lieutenant Colonel Tony Johnson, the pathologist.) Karl Johnson and his C.D.C. colleagues had heard almost nothing about the occurrences upriver in Zaire—all they knew was that people in Zaire were dying of a “fever” that had “generalized symptoms”—no details had come in from the bush or from the hospital where the nun had just died. Yet it sounded like a bad one. Johnson telephoned a friend of his at the English lab, in Porton Down, and reportedly said to him, “If you’ve got any little dregs to spare of that nun’s blood, we’d like to have a look at it.” The Englishman agreed to send it to him, and what he received was literally dregs.
The nun’s blood arrived at C.D.C. in glass tubes in a box lined with dry ice. The tubes had cracked and broken during shipment, and raw, rotten blood had run around inside the box. A C.D.C. virologist named Patricia Webb—who was then married to Johnson—opened the box. She found that the package was sticky with blood. The blood looked like tar. It was black and gooey, like Turkish coffee. She put on rubber gloves, but other than that, she did not take any special precautions in handling the blood. Using some cotton balls, she managed to dab up some of the black stuff, and then by squeezing the cotton between her fingertips, she collected a few droplets of it, just enough to begin testing it for viruses.
Patrica Webb put some of the black blood droplets into flasks of monkey cells, and pretty soon the cells got sick and began to die—they burst. The unknown agent could infect monkey cells and pop them.
Another C.D.C. doctor who worked on the unknown virus was Frederick A. Murphy, a virologist who had helped to identify Marburg virus. He was and is one of the world’s leading electron-microscope photographers of viruses. (His photographs of viruses have been exhibited in art museums.) Murphy wanted to take a close look at those dying cells to see if he could photograph a virus in them. On October 13—the same day Nurse Mayinga was sitting in the waiting rooms of hospitals in Kinshasa—he placed a droplet of fluid from the cells on a small screen and let it dry, and he put it in his electron microscope to see what he could see.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. The sample was jammed with virus particles. The dried fluid was shot through with something that looked like string. His breath stopped in his throat. He thought, Marburg. He believed he was looking at Marburg virus.
Murphy stood up abruptly, feeling strange. The lab where he had prepared these samples—that lab was hot. The lab was as hot as hell. He went out of the microscope room, closing the door behind him, and hurried down a hallway to the laboratory where he had worked with the material. He got a bottle of Clorox bleach and scrubbed the room from top to bottom, washing countertops and sinks, everything, with bleach. He really scoured the place. After he had finished, he found Patricia Webb and told her what he had seen in his microscope. She telephoned her husband and said to him, “Karl, you’d better come quick to the lab. Fred has looked at a specimen, and he’s got worms.”
Staring at the worms, they tried to classify the shapes. They saw snakes, pigtails, branchy, forked things that looked like the letter Y, and they noticed squiggles like a small g, and bends like the letter U, and loopy 6s. They also noticed a classic shape, which they began calling the shepherd’s crook. Other Ebola experts have taken to calling this loop the eyebolt, after a bolt of the same name that can be found in a hardware store. It could also be described as a Cheerio with a long tail.
The next day, Patrica Webb ran some tests on the virus and found that it did not react to any of the tests for Marburg or any other known virus. Therefore, it was an unknown agent, a new virus. She and her colleagues had isolated the strain and shown that it was something new. They had earned the right to name the organism. Karl Johnson named it Ebola.
Karl Johnson has since left the C.D.C., and he now spends a great deal of his time fly-fishing for trout in Montana. He does consulting work on various matters, including the design of pressurized hot zones. I learned that he could be reached at a fax number in Big Sky, Montana, so I sent him a fax. In it, I said that I was fascinated by Ebola virus. My fax was received, but there was no reply. So I waited a day and then sent him another fax. It fell away into silence. The man must have been too busy fishing to bother to answer. After I had given up hope, my fax machine suddenly emitted this reply:
Mr. Preston:
Unless you include the feeling generated by gazing into the eyes of a waving confrontational cobra, “fascination” is not what I feel about Ebola. How about “shit scared?”
Two days after he and his colleagues isolated Ebola virus for the first time, Karl Johnson headed for Africa in the company of two other C.D.C. doctors, along with seventeen boxes of gear, to try to organize an effort to stop the virus in Zaire and Sudan (the outbreak in Sudan was still going on). They flew first to Geneva, to make contact with the World Health Organization, where they found that the WHO knew very little about the outbreaks. So the C.D.C. doctors organized their equipment and packed more boxes, getting ready to go to the Geneva airport, from where they would fly to Africa. But then, at the last possible moment, one of C.D.C. doctors panicked. It is said he was the doctor assigned to go to Sudan, and it is said he was afraid to proceed any farther. It was not an unusual situation. As Karl Johnson explained to me, “I’ve seen young physicians run from these hemorrhagic viruses, literally. They’re unable to work in the middle of an outbreak. They refuse to get off the plane.”
Johnson, one of the discoverers of Ebola virus, preferred to talk about these events while fly-fishing. (“We’ve got to keep our priorities straight,” he explained to me.) So I flew to Montana and spent a couple of days with him fishing for brown trout ont the Bighorn River. It was October, the weather had turned clear and warm, and the cottonwood trees along the banks were yellow and rattled in a south wind. Standing waist-deep in a mutable slick of the river, wearing sunglasses, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a fly rod in his hand, Johnson ripped his line off the water and laid a cast upstream. He was a lean, bearded man, with a soft voice that one had to listen for in the wind. He is a great figure in the history of virus hunting, having discovered and named some of the most dangerous life forms on the planet. “I’m so glad nature is not benign,” he remarked. He studied the water, took a step downstream, and placed anther cast. “But on a day like today, we can pretend nature is benign. All monsters and beasts have their benign moments.”