Time Magazine, December 10, 2014
Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and “us” means everyone, not just those in faraway places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight. For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year.
UTMB’s Thomas Geisbert is one of the spotlighted Ebola fighters. "I just looked at Ebola as a challenge. I’m not the kind of scientist who sits at a desk. I’ve got to be in the middle of it, in the space suit in the lab, in the thick of it. When I do this work, I take it personally,” said Geisbert. "When you do have success, like when we did the TKM-Ebola study, there is no greater feeling. There is no greater feeling than walking in when you know it’s going to work, you’ve got healthy animals—that feeling is awesome. When we did our first study with TKM-Ebola on monkeys, I was like, It would be good if we get 50% protection, it’s a home run. I didn’t expect 100% protection. In this Ebola outbreak, we know at least four to five people got the TKM drug, and all have survived. But we don’t want to say the drug was the reason they survived. While we hope they helped in patients, we can’t say for sure because the patients got so many other things. There are so many confounding variables, so how can you say any one thing made the difference? But it’s a great feeling knowing I was involved in the development of something that hopefully saved somebody. And if it saved one person, it matters."