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From the practical point of view, the susceptibility to infection of the guinea pig proved to be the most useful step forward. Today, all laboratories use this animal for preserving the virus.

At the time when I was conducting my research there was no known method for taking the guinea pig's temperature. I demonstrated a technique which is now widely used.

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another.

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

Even if it had not been possible to reproduce the disease in animals and consequently to verify the hypothesis, this simple observation would have been sufficient to demonstrate the way in which the disease was propagated.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

I have a cat. When I was younger, I had a guinea pig.

From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumors in animals to understand that they might provide a relatively simple entry into a problem as complex as cancer.

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

Though pigs have been proven susceptible to a porcine spongiform encephalopathy, the National Pork Producers Council claims that no naturally occurring cases of 'mad pig' disease have ever been discovered.