The 2015 Nobel season kicked off with awards for discoveries regarding novel therapies for devastating parasitic diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis and malaria. It is easy to identify with the usefulness of such work directly linked to alleviating human suffering. Sometimes, Nobels can go to researchers in abstruse fields. Regardless of how important such research may be, as is the case with the neutrinos figuring in the physics category.
This year’s prizes go to three people in two distinct halves with William Campbell and Satoshi Omura for parasite biology while Chinese researcher YouYou Tu won for herbal therapy aimed at malaria.
It is mind-boggling but true that even today as many as 4,50,000 people die every year from malaria while nearly half the world’s population is at risk. While pharma companies make trillions of dollars from standard formulations to counter malaria, Tu’s traditional herbal medicine fights the worst cases, in the early stages itself at a lower cost. This is people’s medicine at its most effective. The upholding of the efficacy of herbs, when researched thoroughly to extract the most potent disease-fighting chemicals, as Tu has done, also revives confidence in alternate therapies.
The Nobel committee notes that, collectively, Omura and Campbell’s contributions led to the discovery of a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases. The alleviation of the misery of people is reward enough for the life work of researchers. To see them conferred with Nobel prizes is to celebrate their selfless work.
