In 1976, a Belgian Catholic mission and hospital in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was stricken with a mysterious illness that caused fever-like symptoms. Most of the patients who contracted the illness died. A young microbiologist named Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum was called to the mission, where he extracted blood samples from those who had fallen ill. The DRC did not have a functional research laboratory at the time, so Muyembe had to send his samples to Belgium for analysis. The results that came back revealed that they contained a new deadly virus: what the world came to know as Ebola, named after a river near the mission.