Q. Talk a little about Marburg and why that was so scary.

A. In 1967, Marburg virus appeared in Europe in several places that were processing monkey kidneys to make cell culture for things like the polio vaccine. The people started getting sick. Eventually seven people died. That was really the first high containment work we ever did at the C.D.C. We received the virus immediately from Germany and from Britain and went to work on it just to get the basics, so that the C.D.C. would be ready for whatever might happen.

It was another league of threat. This virus was incredibly lethal in monkeys. The pathology is dramatic. The shape of the virus is dramatic. There were so different — Ebola and Marburg — from all the little round viruses that people would otherwise think about. It really got our attention.

Q. Why is shape so important?

A. They are actual filaments, just a flexible rod, and according to how they lay down, the shape will look different. If you look across the electron microscopic field, you see them in all different forms. I think there is something in that shape that is emotional or it strikes something fundamental in the way we think — not that all the other viruses are alike. The variety of shapes is quite amazing. But this was outside the frame of reference, it really just grabs you.

Q. What did the first image of Ebola do to motivate the response to the outbreak?

A. To get back to Africa took more than a week of work. In the days from the time the box arrived from being shipped from Belgium to Atlanta, it was incredibly dramatic. The box was opened by my colleague Patricia Webb, and all of the vials were broken. Anyone else would have brought the box to the autoclave [for sterilization]. She put on a gown and mask and gloves and squeezed a bit of fluid out of the cotton batting, and put it into a cell culture with a lot of extra antibiotics to kill any bacteria that were in there. Within two days, the cells started to look sick. And she gave me a few drops of the cell culture, and I prepared that for the electron microscope.

In those days, you had to be able to grow the virus. There was no genetic identification possible. So it had to go into cell culture and laboratory animals to identify if a virus was even there. What Patricia Webb did was the basis for everything else that followed.