Peter Piot

Peter Karel, Baron Piot, KCMG, FRCP, FMedSci (born 17 February 1949) is a Belgian microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS. After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide. He is the author of 16 books and over 550 scientific articles.

Early life and education

Piot was born in Leuven, Belgium. He studied medicine at Ghent University, and earned an M.D. in 1974. He then began working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp while pursuing a graduate degree in clinical microbiology from the University of Antwerp. He received a PhD in microbiology from the University of Antwerp in 1980.

Piot is fluent in English, French, and Dutch.

Career

In 1976, while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was part of a team that discovered the Ebola virus in a sample of blood taken from a sick nun working in Zaire. Piot and his colleagues subsequently traveled to Zaire to help quell the outbreak. Piot's team made key discoveries into how the virus spread, and traveled from village to village, spreading information and putting the ill and those who had come into contact with them into quarantine. The epidemic was stopped in three months, after it had killed almost 300 people. The events were dramatised by Mike Walker on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 in a production by David Morley. Piot narrated the programme.

Piot has received the majority of the credit for discovering Ebola, since in 1976, he was the one to receive blood samples while working in a lab at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. The samples were originally sent by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a Congolese doctor who obtained the blood samples from those sickened with a mysterious disease in then-Zaire, later discovered to be Ebola. In 2012, Piot published a memoir entitled No Time to Lose which chronicles his professional work, including the discovery of the Ebolavirus; he mentions Muyembe in passing rather than as a co-discoverer. Piot stated in 2019 that "my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience".

In the 1980s, Piot participated in a series of collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zaire. Project SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire was the first international project on AIDS in Africa and is widely acknowledged as having provided the foundations of science's understanding of HIV infection in Africa. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, and at the University of Nairobi, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Lausanne, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He was also a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, a Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

From 1991 to 1994, Piot was president of the International AIDS Society. In 1992, he became Assistant Director of the World Health Organization's Global Programme on HIV/AIDS. On 12 December 1994, he was appointed Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

From 2009 to 2010, Piot served as director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College London.

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

In September 2010, Piot became the director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

In addition to his work at LSHTM, Piot is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2011, Amy Gutmann appointed him to serve on the International Research Panel at the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

In 2014, in the face of an unprecedented Ebola epidemic in western Africa, Piot and other scientists called for the emergency release of the experimental ZMapp vaccine for use on humans before it had undergone clinical testing on humans. That year, he was appointed by Director General Margaret Chan to the World Health Organization's Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann. He also chaired an independent panel convened by Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine into the national and international response to the epidemic, which sharply criticised the response of the WHO and put forward ten recommendations for the body's reorganisation. In February 2020, he criticised the delay in declaring the 2019–20 novel coronavirus outbreak focused on Hubei, China, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and advocated a five-point scale for outbreaks, rather the current binary (emergency/no emergency) system.

In 2020, Piot was appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19, co-chaired by Ursula von der Leyen and Stella Kyriakides.

Other activities

Non-profit organizations

• Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Member of the Board (since 2018)
• Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), Chair of the Board of Directors (since 2017)Olive Shisana and Peter Piot appointed to Africa Health Research Institute Board Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), press release of January 31, 2017.</ref>
• UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR), Chair of the Strategic Coherence of ODA-funded Research (since 2017)
• Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF), Member of the Advisory Panel (since 2015)
• Novartis Foundation, Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2015)
• Antwerp Management School, Member of the International Advisory Board
• Centre Virchow-Villermé, Member of the International Advisory Board
• Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (GHIT), Member of the Board of Directors
• University of Washington, External Member of the Advisory Board at the Department of Global Health
• World Health Summit, Member of the Council

Editorial boards

• The Lancet, Member of the International Advisory Board
• The Lancet Public Health, Member of the Editorial Advisory Board (since 2016)

Recognition

Awards

• Calderone Prize in Public Health (2003)
• Vlerick Award (2004)
• America-Flanders Award (2008)
• Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize (2013),
• Prince Mahidol Award (2013)
• Prix International de l’INSERM (2015)
• Canada Gairdner Global Health Award (2015)
• Manson Medal (2016)

Honours

Piot was appointed an Officer of the Order of the Leopard of Zaire in 1976 for his work during the Ebola outbreak, and was also appointed an Officer of the Order of the Lion of Senegal. He was ennobled as a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium, in 1995. In 2016, he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the United Kingdom.