One reason for this is publication bias: journal editors, reviewers and authors can favour positive, sometimes eye-catching results over negative findings. But negative results waste research funds and researchers’ time if they do not reach the research community through publication, and, in the case of clinical studies, can lead to fruitless patient involvement.

Science is part of culture, and how science is done depends on the culture in which it is practised. Consider how many medical studies were based on male mice and male patients, and so missed important biomedical insights.

“It is very important to have the research done here because at the end of the day, Ebola is our problem,” says Sabue Mulangu, an infectious-disease researcher at the INRB.