The Hot Zone (13 page)

The blood was flown to a national laboratory in Belgium and to the English national 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 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 the 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 gloved fingertips, she collected a few droplets of it, just enough to begin testing it for viruses.

Patricia 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. That lab where he had prepared these samples—that lab was hot. That 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
6
s. 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.

A single Ebola-virus particle with a pronounced “shepherd’s crook”
—
in this case, a tangled double crook. This is one of the first photographs ever made of Ebola. It was taken on October 13, 1976, by Frederick A. Murphy, then of the Centers for Disease Control
—
on the same day that Nurse Mayinga wandered around Kinshasa. The lumpy ropelike braided features in the particle are the mysterious structural proteins. They surround a single strand of
RNA
, which is the virus’s genetic code. Magnification: 112,000 times
.

The next day, Patricia 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:

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 on 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 another cast. “But on a day like today, we can pretend nature is benign. All monsters and beasts have their benign moments.”

“What happened in Zaire?” I asked.

“When we got to Kinshasa, the place was an
absolute madhouse,” he said. “There was no news coming out of Bumba, no radio contact. We knew it was bad in there, and we knew we were dealing with something new. We didn’t know if the virus could be spread by droplets in the air, somewhat like influenza. If Ebola
had
spread easily through the air, the world would be a very different place today.”

“How so?”

“There would be a lot fewer of us. It would have been
exceedingly
difficult to contain that virus if it had had any major respiratory component. I did figure that if Ebola was the Andromeda strain—incredibly lethal and spread by droplet infection—there wasn’t going to be any safe place in the world anyway. It was better to be working at the epicenter than to get the infection at the London opera.”

“Are you worried about a species-threatening event?”

He stared at me. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean a virus that wipes us out.”

“Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent.”

“Nine out of ten humans killed? And you’re not bothered.”

A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. “A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out,” he said.

A scream cut the air. It sounded nonhuman.

He took his eyes off the water and looked around. “Hear that pheasant? That’s what I like about the Bighorn River,” he said.

“Do you find viruses beautiful?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said softly. “Isn’t it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure.” He laid a perfect cast on the water, and eddies took the fly down.

Karl Johnson became the chief of an international
WHO
team that gathered in Kinshasa to try to stop the Ebola outbreak.

The other C.D.C. doctor, Joel Breman, who had flown with Johnson to Zaire, became a member of a field exploration team that boarded an aircraft bound for the interior to see what was going on in Bumba. The airplane was a C-130 Buffalo troop-transport, an American-made military aircraft that belonged to the Zairean Air Force. It happened to be President Mobutu’s private plane, equipped with leopard-skin seats, folding beds, and a wet bar, a sort of flying presidential palace that ordinarily took the president and his family on vacations to Switzerland, but now it carried the
WHO
team into the hot zone, following the Congo River
north by east. They sat on the leopard-skin seats and stared out the windows at endless tracts of rain forest and brown river, a featureless blanket broken by the occasional gleam of an oxbow lake or a cluster of round huts strung like beads on a barely visible road or footpath. As he leaned against the window and watched the terrain unfold into the heart of Africa, Breman became terrified of coming to earth. It was safe in the air, high above the immeasurable forest, but down there … It began to dawn on him that he was going to Bumba to die. He had recently been assigned to Michigan as a state epidemiologist, and suddenly he had been called to Africa. He had left his wife back home in Michigan with their two children, and he began to suspect that he would never see them again. He had brought an overnight bag with a toothbrush, and he had managed to pack a few paper surgical masks and some gowns and rubber gloves into the bag. He did not have proper equipment for handling a hot agent. The Buffalo descended, and the town of Bumba appeared, a rotting tropical port spread out along the Congo River.

The Buffalo landed at an airstrip outside the town. The plane’s Zairean crew was terrified, afraid to breathe the air, and they left the propellers idling while they shoved the doctors down the gangway and heaved their bags out after them. The doctors found themselves standing in the backwash of the Buffalo as it accelerated to take off.

In the town, they met with the governor of Bumba Zone. He was a local politician, quite distraught. He had found himself in deep waters, in over his head. “We are in a bad way,” he told the doctors. “We have not been able to get salt or sugar.” His voice trembled on the edge of weeping as he added, “We have not even been able to get beer.”

A Belgian doctor on the team knew how to handle this situation. With a dramatic flourish, he placed a black airline pilot’s bag on the table. Then he turned the bag upside down, and wads of currency slapped out, making an impressive heap. “Governor, perhaps this will make things a little better,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Breman said to the Belgian.

The Belgian shrugged and replied in a low voice, “Look, this is the way things are done here.”

The governor scooped up the money and pledged his full co-operation together with all the extensive resources of government at his disposal—and he loaned them two Land Rovers.