[johnmarinelli]

The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola, but I think this only perpetuates and helps internalise colonialism. I think a more clear cut case on the issue how the music industry ripped off Chuck Berry and repackaged him as Elvis Presley.

The more we ignore and "justify" the issue with intellectualism, the farther away we all get from a real solution.

[dmix]

There's countless examples of this phenomenon happening while having nothing to do with 'colonialism', blaming that as the primary cause that needs to be addressed seems like selective reasoning. Even AIDs was "co-discovered" (meaning first to identify it as a retrovirus and published in a paper) by a team in France and one in the US around the same time, and only the French team got a nobel prize 25yrs later which was controversial for similar reasons that it's a difficult thing to identify (also note it takes a long time to get this sort of credit).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

[throw_m239339]

It has absolutely nothing to do with "colonialism" as an intersectional buzzword. People take credit for other people's discoveries all the time(Edison for instance), and in this article this isn't even the case. The person who actually identified the virus "ebola" isn't the black guy that took blood samples of infected patients. Saying otherwise is rewriting history to fit an intersectional narrative, which is no better than what you call colonial mentality.

Should teams get credit for discoveries instead of individuals? Sure and both people should get recognition. But let's not be hyperbolic here or claim this is the result of "colonialism", whatever it means in the mouth of people who use that word out of context.

I'm baffled as to how some people always fall for that old intersectional shtick of claiming there is racism,sexism,colonialism everywhere and in everything, just because someone says so. It completely weakens the meaning of these words and turn them into insignificant weasel words because after all they apply to anything...

[fzeroracer]

Let's not mince words here. The person who recognized Ebola and thought it was worth analyzing is a man who holds a phd in virology in microbiology and to this day contributes and advises on Ebola research. Saying he's essentially just a black guy (or an idiot, as another comment here did) is massively downplaying who he is and what he does.

He identified Ebola by being aware that it was different from other diseases he had dealt with and sent it off to a lab for further examination. By your argument the only people that would ever get credit are the people in the labs, not the people doing fieldwork and recognizing new diseases as they appear.

[leftyted]

> It completely weakens the meaning of these words and turn them into insignificant weasel words because after all they apply to anything...

Exactly right.

"When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing."

[danharaj]

You seem to be using intersectional as a general pejorative.

[nkozyra]

> The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola

I agree and addressed that. I don't disagree that colonialism's dark past plays a significant role in these things, but my larger point is "discovery" is always a hotly contested concept.

I'm certainly not attempting to justify or mitigate it, that's specifically the reason I talked about colonialism first. It's important to frame much of our present day as being in the shadow of 19th and 20th century European exploitation abroad.