Sequencing the Ebola virus genome
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When the deadly Ebola virus broke out in West Africa in 2014, scientists in the USA set to work analysing it. What they discovered would eventually lead to a treatment. Pardis Sabeti is a virologist at Harvard University and leads the team who sequenced the Ebola virus genome - she has been speaking to Ibby Caputo for Witness History.
Photo: Pardis Sabeti (front row, right) with some of the team who sequenced the virus in the lab.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. This is the Witness History Podcasts from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:45.0 | First-Tanned accounts of events that have changed our world. |
| 0:49.0 | I'm Ibib Caputo. |
| 0:51.0 | As the world continues to struggle with the virus that causes COVID-19, I'm taking you to the not-so-distant past when a different virus was causing panic. |
| 1:00.0 | In March 2014, the World Health Organization reported cases of Ebola in Guinea. |
| 1:07.0 | In the West African state of Guinea Conakry, 59 people are now known to have died in what was identified today as an outbreak of Ebola fever. |
| 1:15.8 | The symptoms, diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding from all the body's orifices, was first spotted six weeks ago. |
| 1:24.4 | It was the start of what would become the largest outbreak of Ebola in history. |
| 1:29.6 | From Guinea, the virus quickly spread to neighboring countries in West Africa. |
| 1:34.0 | Guinea-Liberian Sierra Leone share these very poorest borders or almost kind of act as one country. |
| 1:40.0 | That's infectious disease expert, Pardee's Sabetti. She's an evolutionary geneticist and a professor at Harvard |
| 1:45.9 | University. We were very concerned that we were going to see cases. |
| 1:49.7 | For six years, Cebetti and her research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts had been working with |
| 1:54.6 | a hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone to test for another deadly virus, Lassa Fever. |
| 2:01.2 | The Kenema Government Hospital was known in West Africa for its ability to |
| 2:05.2 | test and treat contagious viruses. It even had awards set aside for quarantine. |
| 2:10.6 | When hospital staff learned of the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, |
... |
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