Times have changed since Peter Piot discovered ebola, when he was sent a Thermos containing vials of blood from a dead nun — one of which had smashed

Peter Piot was a young medical student when he first broached the idea of devoting his life to hunting down infectious diseases. The unanimous verdict of his professors? That he would be crazy to do it.

It was 1974 and there were still plenty of infectious illnesses around, “plus the occasional nasty new outbreak in some distant, benighted place”, he says. In general, though, the feeling was that the microbes had been all but vanquished by antibiotics and vaccines. “There’s no future in infectious diseases,” one supervisor told him. “They’ve all been solved.”

Half a century later, coronavirus has put that idea to bed.

Professor Piot is now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine but the best way to describe him