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Meet the Doctor Trying To Use the Blood of Ebola Survivors To Create a Cure
An anonymous reader points out this article about Dr. James Crowe, who is trying to use the blood of Ebola survivors to develop a cure. "For months, Vanderbilt University researcher Dr. James Crowe has been desperately seeking access to the blood of U.S. Ebola survivors, hoping to extract the proteins that helped them overcome the deadly virus for use in new, potent drugs. His efforts finally paid off in mid-November with a donation from Dr. Rick Sacra, a University of Massachusetts physician who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia. The donation puts Crowe at the forefront of a new model for fighting the virus, now responsible for the worst known outbreak in West Africa that has killed nearly 7,000 people. Crowe is working with privately-held drugmaker Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc, which he said will manufacture the antibodies for further testing under a National Institutes of Health grant. Mapp is currently testing its own drug ZMapp, a cocktail of three antibodies that has shown promise in treating a handful of Ebola patients."
I've watched way too many zombie movies to feel comfortable with the drug's name.
As soon as I read the overview on the front page my immediate thought was that this thread was going to be filled with racist crap
Especially given the unfortunate coincidental baggage of this doctor's name. It sounds like Jim Crow, the nickname for the policy of systematic racial segregation in the southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. (Outside the US, you might know it as "apartheid".) James Crowe was also the name of one of the six Confederate veterans who founded the Ku Klux Klan, the others being Richard Reed, John Lester, Frank McCord, Calvin Jones, and John Kennedy. And Ebola is often thought of as a "black" disease.