CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
9 a.m., March 24, 2014
Over the years, Dr. Pardis Sabeti had forged ties with the Lassa program, and had become friends with Humarr Khan. When Khan joined her conference call, she was sitting at her desk in her office at her laboratory in the Northwest Building at Harvard University. Other scientists were speaking from other locations. Just then, Sabeti’s pet brown rat, Coco, was either asleep in her lap or was exploring Sabeti’s office, which the rat did fairly often. (“People probably think I’m psychotic, but I don’t do caged animals,” Sabeti says.) Pardis Sabeti was then an associate professor of biology at Harvard. She is a slender person, then in her late thirties, with a warm manner. She specializes in reading and analyzing the genomes of organisms. In addition to running a lab at Harvard, Sabeti leads viral genome efforts at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In particular, she studies virus evolution—the way viruses change over time as they adapt to their environments. In her spare time, she is the lead singer and songwriter for an indie band called Thousand Days. The band’s fourth album ended up getting delayed due to the Ebola outbreak.
“Humarr, how are you?” Sabeti asked. “I’m worried about you. I’m worried Ebola could get to Sierra Leone.”
Khan said he was worried, too. The Lassa program’s Hot Lab was the only high-biocontainment laboratory anywhere across an extended region of West Africa. The first principle of warfare against an emerging virus is to know where it is moving. Yet Humarr Khan had no lab machines that could identify Ebola virus in human blood. If Ebola crossed the river and entered Sierra Leone, Khan and his team would need to be able to identify people who were carrying Ebola. If infected people could be identified, then they could be isolated inside the Lassa ward and cared for by specially trained nurses wearing hazmat gear. This would stop the virus from getting into other people, and it would break the chains of infection.
Sabeti offered Khan a special device known as a PCR machine. It could detect the genetic code of Ebola in human blood, and so it could be used to test patients’ blood. She said she’d send him one immediately, along with people who could train Khan’s Hot Lab staff in how to use it.
After talking with Khan, Sabeti went out of her office, shutting the door behind her so her rat wouldn’t get loose, and she drove to the Broad Institute, which occupies a pair of crystalline buildings in Kendall Square next to the MIT campus. About four thousand scientists work regularly at the Broad, where they decode and analyze the genomes of organisms. At her offices on the sixth floor, Sabeti called a meeting with a few people, a group that would grow in size and would be known as the Ebola War Room Team. They began planning and directing elements of the human defense against Ebola. Sabeti raided her Harvard lab budget for $600,000 worth of equipment, lab supplies, and cash. By the end of the day, she had given two of her colleagues, Kristian Andersen and Stephen Gire, the assignment of taking the stuff to Kenema and setting up an Ebola blood lab for Humarr Khan. Andersen and Gire made preparations to depart for West Africa as soon as possible.
INTEGRATED RESEARCH FACILITY
FREDERICK, MARYLAND
Next day, March 25
Humarr Khan had been reading up on Ebola, and it alarmed him. The day after he spoke with Pardis Sabeti, he talked with a scientist named Joseph Fair, who was then working for an American biotech firm called Metabiota. Khan and Fair were close friends and drinking buddies, and Khan had once saved Joseph Fair’s life. Fair offered to set up a blood lab for Khan in Kenema, and Khan said sure, absolutely. Pardis Sabeti was sending him a blood lab, too, but he wanted to play it safe.
As soon as he had made plans with Khan, Joseph Fair reached out to his friend Lisa Hensley at the IRF. He asked her if she’d like to come with him to Kenema and help set up the lab for Khan. Hensley knew Khan pretty well. She had gone to Kenema with Fair once before, and the two scientists had worked together setting up a Lassa blood-testing lab for Khan.
Lisa Hensley liked Humarr Khan, and the idea of helping in the Ebola outbreak still really intrigued her. She went back to her boss, Peter Jahrling, and asked him if she could get a short leave of absence from the IRF so that she could travel to Kenema and help Khan. “I can do this,” she said to Jahrling.
“I couldn’t argue with Lisa this time,” Jahrling now says. He knew Humarr Khan, too, and liked him. He contacted his boss at the NIH, and they worked out a deal: The NIH would loan Lisa Hensley to the U.S. Department of Defense for a three-week military deployment to Kenema Government Hospital. Hensley was a civilian, but while she was in Africa she would be operating inside the U.S. military chain of command.
Hensley soon received a letter from Humarr Khan:
Dear Dr. Hensley,
It is with great pleasure I write to invite you to help with your expertise on epidemic preparedness and outbreak response on Ebola fever….The very long border we are sharing with Guinea increase[s] the susceptibility of a possible import of this disease to our country.
Meanwhile, Pardis Sabeti’s scientists had already arrived in Kenema, and they quickly finished setting up their blood-testing equipment in the Lassa program’s Hot Lab.
At this point, the U.S. military changed Hensley’s deployment orders. She had to go where the military sent her, and she was assigned to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, to set up an Ebola blood-testing lab for the government of Liberia. Several cases of Ebola had been reported in that country. She wouldn’t be going to Kenema; she wouldn’t be working with Humarr Khan after all.
Hensley and Joseph Fair went into the supply storerooms of the IRF, as well as the storerooms at USAMRIID, and they began assembling all the elements of a portable space-suit lab for testing blood. They began packing everything into military trunks for air shipment to Liberia. One evening, when Hensley was at home and putting her personal things into a duffle bag, James offered to help her pack. He went into her closet and got out a wide-brimmed beach hat and stuffed it into her duffel bag. “You need a hat so you won’t get sunburned in Africa,” he said.
It was just around then that Menindor the healer, the sage with almond eyes who kept a magic snake in her house, fell sick in Kpondu village. As Hensley packed for Africa, Menindor lay in bed in her house in Kpondu, with vomiting and diarrhea, while her elderly mother and her sister cared for her. For the many people who depended on Menindor and cherished her, her illness must have been a frightening thing to see. It seemed that not even Menindor’s powers could overcome the evil force of the sickness that was visiting the villages of Sierra Leone.