What Andersen has proposed doing would completely upend the economics and mechanics of the pharmaceutical development pipeline; if successful, he won’t need to spend years in the lab to find antibodies against Ebola. He just needed human survivors; their bodies had already done all the work. Modern sequencing technology could find the information he needed.

Plus, if it works, Andersen’s approach could become a faster, cheaper way to make new antibody medicines not just for Ebola but for any disease—bacterial, viral, anything a person’s immune system might ever gin up an antibody against. If the process works for one pathogen, it should work for all of them. Antibody drugs wouldn’t be haute couture anymore; they’d be ready-to-wear, cheap and widely available.

To test his hypothesis, though, Andersen needed one key ingredient: the blood of people who had survived Ebola.