I spent most of last week at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a 1,500-person meeting of epidemiologists, physicians and microbiologists that is co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Society for Microbiology. The ICEID, as it’s known for short, happens every two years, but this iteration was way overdue, postponed twice from its initial date of spring 2014 because so many potential attendees were working on the international outbreak of Ebola.

As a result, when this scary-disease convocation assembled, there was a lot to talk about—and in fact, a good portion of the meeting was devoted to re-examinations of the public health response, medical strategy and vaccine research that swirled around the Ebola epidemic. But at less-attended speeches, and