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

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.

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

When I worked in development, organization was formal and collaborations were informal. People shared ideas and exactly who thought up what wasn't too important. Overall performance mattered more. Documents that were published were only circulated internally. Patents were sometimes applied for, but inventorship was settled informally.

After I transferred to research I was struck by how important priority of ideas became. Organization was informal but collaborations became formal. Who was principle investigator was very important. Publications were external and who's name appeared in what order was very important. Patents were fought over.

Even in an industrial research lab it got pretty weird. I can only imagine how it is at a place like CDC. Being first author on a paper describing a new disease probably makes your career.

The more we ignore and "justify" the issue with intellectualism, the farther away we all get from a real solution.

"[Pattyn] claimed that we needed a few more days to ready it for transport," Piot wrote. "So we kept a few tubes of VERO cells, as well as some of the newborn mice, which were dying. Perhaps it was a stubborn rebellion against the whole Belgian history of constantly being forced to grovel to a greater power. That material was just too valuable, too glorious to let it go."

> The discovery, says Muyembe, was thanks to a "consortium of research." But Google "Who discovered Ebola?" and you get a bunch of names — all of them white Western males. Dr. Jean Jacques Muyembe has been written out of history. "Yes, but it is ..." he pauses. He takes a breath and laughs, looking for the right way to respond. "Yes. It is not correct," he says. "It is not correct."

... and since the internet is full of people who love to comment on articles without actually reading them I think that is worth explicitly mentioning here.

(to be clear: not a slight against your comment)

Belgian colonialism was particularly vicious and damaging. It is certain that its consequences extend to the present day.

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

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?

Probably yes. Europe and Central Africa were already connected and trading since the 1400's[1]. The kingdom of Kongo sent an ambassador to Vatican in the 1600's[2]. Things would have played out differently if the slave trade in the Americas did not precipitate the downfall of many African kingdoms. The part of Congo where Ebola was discovered would probably not have been called Congo today.

Colonialism's goal was not to trade or bring technological advances but rather to accelerate the exploitation of the continent[3]. Belgian colonialism in particular was vicious at that.[4]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogo_C%C3%A3o

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuele_Ne_Vunda

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

Payback for the mass forced labor of Congolese to extract rubber? I don't even live in Belgium or the Congo and we learned about atrocities committed under Leopold II in school[0]. In particular Belgian colonial authorities would cut off the hands of those who failed to meet their rubber quota.

> would the Congolese have had electron microscopes but for Belgian colonialism?

If their economic structure wasn't devastated by mass forced labor then yes, they might have been able to afford one. Colonialism presents no benefit to the colonized, under the British Raj "India's share of the world economy declined from 24.4% in 1700 down to 4.2% in 1950"[1]. The United States (since you mention it in your second paragraph implicitly as an example of an advanced nation) itself was founded to oppose the economic crippling that colonial rule necessitates.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India

"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."

It doesn't mean nobody in the world knew about that sushi restaurant before me. It means nobody in my group knew about it, nobody told me, and I found it by personal experience, and shared the information among my community.

So yes, David Livingstone discovered the falls.

We don't constantly have to try to degrade the contributions that western people made to the world just because they're white. Livingstone made huge sacrifices to push on where almost everyone else gave up and he linked together pathways of information that didn't exist before. He did the exploring; he took the risk; he should get credit _for those efforts and sacrifices_ as should the people who sent him. Its ridiculous to try to equate his achievement with the people who were simply born in the areas he explored and lived there as their default state of traditional existence.

That doesn't make the discovery less important from a Western history perspective? I guess it's about recognising which truth is being told.

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 name something was discovered, and how we tell these stories. We can't say Christopher Columbus discovered America for mankind, but it was news to a smaller proportion of people.

> 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.

But Dr. Piot himself he intentionally left out the pepole who provided him with the evidence to make his claims, who themselves made the claims he was merely confirming.