How can we discuss the Ebola virus disease (EVD) without his name immediately coming to mind? A native of Bandundu village and the child of a poor farmer, Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum was there during the first Ebola outbreak in 1976.
By then, he was the young professor of microbiology at the University of Kinshasa who visited the Belgian mission hospital in Yambuku in the Northern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where an unknown virus was claiming the lives of the people.
Two decades later, he proposed the use of antibodies from the blood of the survivors to treat the virus. The impression was that the antibodies present in cured patients possess the potency to neutralize the viruses in sick patients.
Sadly, however, the scientific community dismissed his findings even though seven out of the eight patients were cured by the antibodies. Not long ago, the idea was revisited and reviewed by Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB) and the National Institute of Health Vaccine Research Center in the US, and the outcome of this reassessment was the mAb114 molecule, which was recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for use in EVD.
Having traversed the challenging terrain of the Ebola virus, the crown of achievement is now his to wear.
In 2020, he was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine. Prior to that, Nature included him in its list of the ten people who mattered in science.
In a press release on The Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for Medical Research, the government of Japan described him as a scientist with "outstanding courage, intelligence and scientific rigor."
It will be wrong to label him solely as an Ebola champion because his strides transcend the fight against the virus. In 2015, he received the award of Le Prix Christophe Merieux from the Institut de France for his remarkable accomplishments and valuable contributions in the research field of infectious diseases like Poliomyelitis, Measles, Yellow fever, Monkeypox, and Viral Hemorrhagic Fever.
More importantly, his unparalleled contribution to the field of academics is remarkable. With over 40 years of actively nurturing the minds of more than 1000 young researchers in the DRC and twenty-five years as the general director of the INRB, he can rightfully be referred to as the sage of science.