One Harvard Lab, Six Iranian Scientists, and Some Tea

Last September, on a warm Wednesday evening, I walked through Cambridge with an Iranian-born geneticist named Pardis Sabeti. A few days before, the UN had convened a large summit “to address large movements of refugees and migrants.” Republican nominee Donald Trump was on the campaign trail, describing refugees as Trojan horses and making stark promises about curtailing immigration. His son had just tweeted an infamous image comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles.

For Sabeti, the rhetoric hit close to home. In 1978, her family fled the Iranian Revolution and eventually settled in Florida. “I’m proud to be a refugee,” she told me. “I think that tomorrow, I’m going to tweet a picture of myself as a little girl. Is there an ‘I’m a refugee’ hashtag going round?” I don’t know, but you could certainly start one, I told her. And she did.

In the photo to help set up molecular tests to detect the virus. And as the outbreak grew around her, she gathered and repeatedly sequenced the virus’s genome. It was the first effort of its kind, and it delivered the much-needed proof that Ebola was spreading from person to person, and revealed where and how fast it was mutating.