Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum
Helped identify Ebola in 1976 and spent the next five decades fighting its outbreaks
Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum was born in 1942 in the Belgian Congo and trained as a doctor before studying virology in Belgium. In 1976 he was sent to a mission near the Ebola River in northern Zaire to investigate a fever that was killing people within days. With little protective equipment beyond rubber gloves, he collected blood samples from patients and helped isolate a new virus, later named after the river.
For decades afterward he ran the country's national biomedical research institute with almost no international funding or attention, returning again and again to outbreaks in remote and unstable regions that few outside scientists would risk visiting. He championed the then unfashionable idea that the blood plasma of survivors, carrying antibodies, could treat the newly infected, an approach dismissed for years before later evidence supported it.
When Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014 and killed thousands, he was one of the very few scientists alive who had witnessed the disease's first appearance. He went on to help lead the response to the even larger epidemic in eastern Congo from 2018, coordinating trials of vaccines and antibody treatments that eventually cut the death rate sharply.
He worked through war zones, mistrust of outsiders and chronic shortages of equipment, in a career that received little global recognition until very late in his life, treating each outbreak as unfinished business from 1976.