Nancy Jaax—Eugene Johnson

Nancy Jaax and Gene Johnson’s relationship was a scientific collaboration formed around a high-risk Ebola experiment at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Johnson directed the research into possible treatments; Jaax joined as its pathologist, responsible for examining the monkeys and identifying the causes of their deaths. Their work brought research and pathology together inside a Biosafety Level 4 suite, where the experiment’s failure and an alarming result among its controls altered how the virus’s spread was understood.

Project and Division of Work

Johnson was a civilian scientist with expertise in Ebola and Marburg. In the negative-pressure rooms of the Ebola suite, known as AA-5, he had infected monkeys with Ebola and administered drugs to test whether they could halt the disease. The research question was practical and urgent: whether treatment might help infected animals recover, and perhaps point toward a way to fight Ebola in people. The monkeys had begun dying as the experiment proceeded.

Jaax volunteered to join the project as its pathologist. Her responsibility was to determine the cause of death by examining the animals. The assignment made her a collaborator in Johnson’s research, but not in the same role: he led the experiment and administered the treatments, while her pathology work examined what the disease had done. Her veterinary training gave her the qualifications for the task, though working with a lethal virus in Level 4 containment placed her among the Institute’s most carefully scrutinized personnel.

The project’s premise also underscored why monkeys were being used. Humans and monkeys are both primates, and Ebola could infect both; the virus did not respect the distinction between a laboratory animal and a person. For Johnson, the animals offered a way to test drugs against a disease that could not be treated as an ordinary infection. For Jaax, the potential benefit to human medicine existed alongside a difficult veterinary obligation to animals suffering in the experiment.

Entry into the Ebola Suite

Jaax’s participation was not automatic. Some colleagues doubted that she could work safely in a protective suit, and her hands were treated as a possible safety concern. She volunteered because she wanted to prove her ability and continue working with lethal viruses, but authorization to enter Level 4 depended on a separate decision by her superior. Johnson’s role as project leader placed him in the position of working with her once she joined the research; the account identifies her approval and entry as an institutional decision, not a choice Johnson made alone.

When Jaax arrived to learn what had happened overnight, a caretaker’s handwritten note on the viewing window reported that two monkeys had died. The heavy glass looked into the Ebola suite, but the animals could not be seen through it. Their condition made prompt examination important: after death, tissue affected by Ebola could deteriorate quickly, limiting the time available for useful dissection. Jaax knew the work ahead would be more than observation through a window; she would have to enter the containment area and carry out the pathology.

Johnson accompanied Jaax on her first trips into the suite, both to teach her the procedures and to observe her work. He watched her hands as she handled the animals and tools. That supervision joined training to the demands of the experiment: the work had to be performed carefully, and a protective suit did not make careless handling harmless. Johnson’s close attention reflected the particular risks of this research, while Jaax’s participation put her professional competence to practical test.

Working Together in Containment

Their collaboration took shape through coordinated, deliberate tasks. A dead monkey was moved from its cage into a biohazard container and carried to the necropsy room. There, Johnson laid out numbered instruments and called through a checklist; Jaax assisted, passed tools, and carried out parts of the examination. They wore multiple layers of gloves over their protective suits. Rather than use sharp blades that could damage the protective layers, they worked with blunt-ended scissors and other instruments suited to the procedure.

Jaax’s work required both technical concentration and judgment about pace. She handled the examination while Johnson monitored the procedure, and she had to keep her movements controlled in an environment where a breach in protection could have serious consequences. The process was not simply Johnson conducting an experiment while Jaax watched: she performed the pathology that gave the project information about the animals’ deaths, while his treatment experiment supplied the cases she examined.

The professional purpose did not remove the emotional difficulty for Jaax. She believed that her duty as a veterinarian included caring for animals, and she had long found their deaths hard to bear. At the same time, she understood the research as an effort to find a treatment that might reduce human suffering and avert a larger tragedy. Those obligations did not resolve neatly into one another. Her work with Johnson was therefore also a point of tension between veterinary care and medical research, a conflict Jaax managed by keeping her attention on the procedure and its possible benefit.

Results and the Uninfected Controls

The drug experiment did not succeed as a treatment study. The drugs had no apparent effect: every monkey deliberately infected with Ebola died. That result made the trial a failure in its intended search for an effective intervention, however carefully its procedures had been carried out. The only animals that initially remained healthy were the two uninfected control monkeys housed across the room from the infected group.

About two weeks after an incident involving a bloody glove, the control animals developed signs of Ebola and died. They had not been deliberately infected, and they were separated from the sick monkeys by open floor. The unexpected outcome sharply changed the significance of the experiment. It was no longer only a test of whether drugs could help infected animals; the control group raised a question about how infection could pass between monkeys that had not been intentionally exposed.

Jaax later connected the controls’ illness to a possible route through the air. She proposed that secretions from the monkeys, or droplets produced when caretakers washed cages with hoses, could have become airborne. The precise route was not established by the observation alone: the controls’ illness demonstrated an unexplained transmission within the suite, while aerosolized droplets were her explanation for how it might have happened. That distinction mattered. The experiment supplied a warning, not a complete account of the mechanism.

Significance of the Collaboration

The collaboration’s outcome was double-edged. Johnson’s drugs failed to save any of the deliberately infected monkeys, but the experiment’s controls produced evidence that challenged the assumption that Ebola spread only by direct contact. Jaax’s pathology role linked the observed deaths to the course of the disease, while her attention to the control animals and the conditions in the suite helped make the unexplained pattern consequential. Their work did not settle every question about airborne transmission, but it made the possibility impossible to dismiss as merely theoretical.

The partnership is defined less by a personal relationship than by a division of scientific responsibility under containment: Johnson designed and led the drug experiment, and Jaax entered it as the pathologist who examined its animal subjects. Its larger consequence emerged from a result neither the treatment plan nor the clean separation of the control animals could comfortably explain. In that sense, the failed experiment became informative in an unexpected way: the animals that were meant to show what happened without deliberate infection instead raised a new question about how the virus had reached them.