In this guest blog for Gray Matters, UTMB’s Thomas Geisbert recalls the day he discovered Ebola-Reston: In 1989, I was 27 years old and was working as a research microbiologist at the United States Army Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. … I had been doing a lot of electron microscopy, viewing viruses at a very high magnification to study their structure and their biology. We decided to look at the cell cultures from the Reston facility samples with the electron microscope. To my great surprise, when I looked at the samples I did not see small spherical virus particles consistent with simian hemorrhagic fever. Instead I saw long filamentous virus particles that were spaghetti-shaped and cells with virus inclusions that looked like either Ebola virus or Marburg virus. I took pictures of this virus and took them to my mentor, Dr. Peter Jahrling. He thought I was joking. When I convinced him that I was not joking, he called in Dr. C.J. Peters, who was his boss. I am not sure whether he was joking or not, but Dr. Peters threatened to fire me if this was some sort of joke. Later that day we confirmed that the virus responsible for the outbreak was Ebola.