researchers during this period, I’d like to think it was mostly a matter
of obliviousness rather than malicious intentions. Scientific culture
just wasn’t adapted for outbreak timelines. Researchers are used to
developing protocols, performing thorough analysis, writing up their
methods, submitting the results to be peer-reviewed by fellow
scientists. This process can take months – if not years – and has
historically slowed the release of new data.
Such delays are a problem across science and medicine. When
Jeremy Farrar took over as director of the Wellcome Trust in March
2014, he told The Guardian that clinical research often took too long,
something that became apparent in the following months as the
Ebola outbreak grew. ‘The systems we have got in place are not fit
for purpose when the situation is moving quickly,’ Farrar said. ‘We
have nothing that enables us to respond in real time.’[13]
This culture is gradually changing. In mid-2018, what would
become another major Ebola outbreak began in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. This time, researchers were quick to release
new sequence data. Teams also launched a clinical trial of four
experimental treatments. By August 2019, they’d shown that a
prompt infusion of anti-Ebola immune cells could increase
someone’s chances of survival to over 90 per cent, up from a
historical average of around 30 per cent. Meanwhile, outbreak
scientists are increasingly posting draft papers on websites like
bioRxiv and medRxiv, which aim to make new research accessible
before it undergoes peer-review.[14]
During her time working in Sierra Leone, Sabeti discovered that
the word for Kenema, the city where they were based, meant ‘clear
like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze’.[15] This
openness was reflected in her team’s work, with those ninety-nine
sequences shared early in the outbreak. The attitude has also taken
hold among the wider community of outbreak researchers. One of
the best examples is the Nextstrain project, pioneered by
computational biologists Trevor Bedford and Richard Neher. This
online platform automatically collates genetic sequences to show
how different viruses are related and where they might have come