Today, Murphy will be in Philadelphia to receive the $100,000 Penn Vet World Leadership Award, the biggest cash prize for veterinary research. His animal studies years ago laid the groundwork for understanding many of the latest emerging human diseases.
"When these viruses first came on the scene, it required an incredible amount of medical detective work," said Gary Nabel, head of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health. And the stakes are always raised, he said, when you are dealing with a terrifyingly deadly germ.
Murphy, 74 and now a full professor at the University of Texas, Galveston, said he saw his life as a series of lucky breaks - and not just because he never contracted Marburg or Ebola.
He was hired at just 25 to head the viral-pathology branch at the Centers for Disease Control. He moved up the ranks, becoming the first veterinarian in a position of leadership at the CDC.
To this day, Murphy says he doesn't know why he was chosen. "I was an obscure veterinary grad student," he said in a phone interview Friday from Galveston.
He did, however, have experience diagnosing rabies in the Army Veterinary Corps. So he knew a thing or two about dealing with deadly viruses. This experience served him well a few years later, when he was called upon to investigate the horrific outbreak in Germany.
Jumping germ
A mystery germ had apparently jumped from monkeys to workers at a vaccine research lab in Marburg. The disease - a type of hemorrhagic fever - started with intense bleeding of the nose and gums and, in the worst cases, progressed to bleeding out of every orifice as the virus attacked the lining of blood vessels, killing its host.
German researchers isolated the virus and sent it to Murphy and a handful of colleagues at the CDC.
Today's sophisticated containment facilities did not exist then, so the group borrowed a mobile laboratory that someone had built on the back of an 18-wheeler.
