A Registered Nurse became the first person (out of two volunteers Nation-wide) to receive a trial vaccine for Ebola. Two people...the other is a landscape developer in Maryland.

Steve Rucker, a registered nurse at the National Institutes of Health, broke with his lunchtime routine yesterday, forgoing his usual visit to the cafeteria and opting instead to roll up his sleeve for a shot filled with the biological essence of Ebola -- one of the world's deadliest and goriest diseases.
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"I've had better lunches," Rucker quipped as the shot's 100 trillion strands of synthetic DNA began to make their way into the cells in his arm.

Rucker is a pioneer in a high-tech effort to beat Ebola. If the vaccine works in people as it has in monkeys, it could fell one of the world's most horrid infectious scourges.

Alas, health officials say, despite weeks of advertisements and other pleas, only two people have volunteered to be part of the effort.
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The irony, scientists and doctors lament, is that this first Ebola vaccine is probably the safest and most sophisticated vaccine ever made, without a single component coming from the virus itself.

Indeed, the product spray-blasted into Rucker's arm (no needle necessary) is by any standard a marvel of biotechnological engineering. It was designed to rally the immune system even more than a real Ebola infection would, without causing any symptoms of the disease itself.

"It's remarkably sophisticated technology," said Gary Nabel, the virologist who is leading the Ebola effort in a fast-track program that has catapulted his basic research from the lab bench to the clinic in just three years.

Someday, perhaps two billion people will be grateful to Mr. Rucker for taking the time and risk to do what he did. Bravo.