No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses
By Nathan Seppa
When smallpox was eradicated in the 1970s, many people thought it was “game over” for infectious diseases as global threats. How wrong they were.
Peter Piot, then a young physician-researcher, was in the right place at the right time, if you can call it that. Piot was working in Belgium in 1976 when his laboratory received two vials of blood from a victim of a disease outbreak in Africa. They arrived in a thermos, and no one knew they contained a deadly virus.