Peter Piot

Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot (born 17 February 1949) is a Belgian-British microbiologist whose work focused on Ebola and AIDS. In 1976, he was part of the team that identified the Ebola virus and helped stop the first known Ebola outbreak. He later became a leading figure in AIDS research. Over his career, Piot held senior roles at the United Nations and the World Health Organization, overseeing AIDS research and management, and taught at universities around the world. He has written 16 books and more than 600 scientific articles. Piot grew up in Keerbergen, Belgium, the oldest of three children. His father worked as a civil servant in agricultural exports, and his mother ran a construction company. He began studying physics at Ghent University’s School of Engineering and Physics before switching to medicine. While in medical school, he earned a Diploma in Tropical Medicine from the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp. He received his MD from Ghent University in 1974 and a PhD in clinical microbiology from the University of Antwerp in 1980. In 1976, while at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was on a team that examined a blood sample from a sick nun in Zaire and found a virus similar to Marburg. He and colleagues then traveled to Zaire as part of an International Commission set up by the Zaire government to control the outbreak. The Commission discovered how the virus spread, moving from village to village to share information and quarantine the sick and their contacts. The epidemic was already fading when they arrived, thanks to local and national efforts, and ended after three months, killing nearly 300 people. The events were dramatised on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014, with Piot narrating. Most credit for discovering Ebola has gone to Piot, because in 1976 he was said to have received the blood samples in his Antwerp lab. The samples were reportedly sent by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a Congolese doctor who collected them from patients with a mysterious illness in Zaire. In his 2012 memoir *No Time to Lose*, Piot mentions Muyembe only briefly, not as a co-discoverer. A 2016 article in the *Journal of Infectious Disease*, co-signed by most involved in the first outbreak—including Piot and Muyembe—refuted both men’s claims to a major role in the early discovery. Piot said in 2019 that his book was a personal account, not a history of Ebola. During the 1980s, Piot worked on collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zaire. Project SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire, was the first international AIDS project in Africa and is widely seen as laying the groundwork for understanding HIV infection on the continent. He held professorships in microbiology and public health at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, the University of Nairobi, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the University of Lausanne, and was a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He also served as a senior fellow at the University of Washington, a scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From 1991 to 1994, Piot was president of the International AIDS Society. In 1992, he became assistant director of the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on HIV/AIDS. On 12 December 1994, he was appointed executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations. From 2009 to 2010, he directed the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College London. In October 2010, Piot became director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He is a member of the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2011, Amy Gutmann appointed him to the International Research Panel at the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. During the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Piot and other scientists called for emergency use of the experimental ZMapp vaccine before human clinical trials. That year, WHO Director General Margaret Chan appointed him to the Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann. He also chaired an independent panel convened by Harvard Global Health Institute and LSHTM that sharply criticised the WHO’s response and proposed ten reforms. In February 2020, he criticised the delay in declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and advocated for a five-point scale for outbreaks instead of the binary emergency/no-emergency system.