“One of the most interesting people I met was a woman named Nancy Sullivan, a scientist at NIH who has spent a decade working on a vaccine for a disease that had never had an outbreak of more than 100 people, that was over in Africa, that no one really knew about. She’s laboring away in a lab for a decade trying to build this vaccine that no one really cared about, to be honest. And all of a sudden, Ebola was a big global problem. And the vaccine she spent a decade working on was a critical part of the response. The president went to her lab at NIH, went to the bench she’s been working at, saw her notebook with her notes from when she first discovered this vaccine, a little notation in her notebook where she’s just written in the margins, “Yahoo!” Seeing her fill these little pipettes and tubes and all these things, do this work, you know, it was just really inspiring. And knowing that there are just people out there doing this work quietly in labs, no one really knows if their work’s going to matter to anyone; they’re just doing it because of their dedication to science and medicine and trying to find cures—it was really amazing.”
From Michael Grunwald's fascinating extended interview with Ron Klain on the White House Ebola effort.
In December, I posted my thoughts on the US Ebola response.
