Did you ever consider not going back to Ebola? I asked. “No,” she said. Why do you love this work so much? “I don’t know,” she said, and began to ruminate. “I mean, why Ebola? It only kills maybe a couple hundred people a year.” That is, it hasn’t been a disease of massive global significance and, notwithstanding the lurid scenarios that some people evoke, it’s unlikely ever to become one. But she could cite its attractions in scientific terms. She took deep interest, for instance, in the fact that such a simple organism can be so potently lethal. It contains only a tiny genome, enough to
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The allure of Ebola
