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Bisrat Godefay Debeb used to get some odd looks when he asked people to hand over bits of sheep they were preparing for dinner. As an undergraduate in veterinary medicine at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, he was enthralled by his studies and would collect hearts and lungs that family members had removed from the animals at their home in Tigray to show younger students how the respiratory and circulatory systems functioned. Even when his family planned on cooking the organs, Debeb recalls, “I was like, ‘No, you cannot do this. I have to show this to my students.’”
Debeb had always been interested in biology, but the realization that he wanted to turn this interest into a research career came toward the end of his degree. For his senior project, he analyzed raw cow’s milk at dairy farms and milk collection centers and detected bacterial ...
