Question

the ebola virus outbreak of 2014 was historically the largest in scope as many people were infected in multiple countries. what does the race provide therapies to subdue an outbreak such as this reveal about the nature of science and scientific discovery?

Answer 1

Outbreaks have been common to human history. There have been several outbreaks that have led to widespread devastation of human population, kingdoms, empires and economies. Moreover they have had social and political impact on societies that emerged.

Few of these outbreaks that have challenged a large chunk of humanity are Spanish Flu, Bubonic Plague, etc. Ebola and other recent outbreaks of SARS, MERS, Zika etc. have also been disastrous but much less effective in affecting human population than were the previous outbreaks.

This is highly correlated with the burst in scientific research. Increased education of the society, establishment of scientific institutions and research labs, increased amount of funds paid by developed countries for research and healthcare have all taken place in the recent years.

This has allowed isolating viruses from the patient samples, their culture in laboratory conditions, studying their structure using CryoEM or NMR etc., developing drugs and vaccines to be much quicker. Additionally increased use of technologies and machinery to mass produce items have allowed large-scale production of drugs as and when needed. Thus the potential of a disease to challenge human societies has decreased considerably.