Left to right: Dustin Shahab Griesemer, Shervin Tabrizi, Pardis Sabeti, Siavash Zamirpour, Kian Sani, Mahan NekouIMAGE COURTESY OF PARDIS SABETIBefore Time named her one of 2014’s most influential people for her work on the genetics of Ebola in West Africa, before she won a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator award, before she embarked on a scientific career, Harvard University’s Pardis Sabeti was 2-and-a-half-year-old who was bustled out of Iran with her family, mere months before the country’s Shah was overthrown in 1979.
“My dad was basically a high-ranking intelligence officer,” Sabeti told The Scientist. “So he was one of the folks that would be the most targeted by the new regime, which is why he made sure that we got out right away.”
Sabeti, along with her mother, sister, cousins, grandparents, and other relatives first landed in Hawaii. “I just remember being in these houses with like 20 people, all sort of staying together, in probably what was one of those tiny townhouses with a couple bedrooms,” she recalled. “For a kid, that was kind of nice. Because most kids, you put them in the bedroom by themselves, and they see monsters. I was sleeping in a room with my grandmother and my aunt and my sister ...
