The committee that awards Nobel Prizes came in for a lot of criticism lately, and rightly so, with regard to the awarding of the Peace Prize to United States President Barack Obama. But it also deserves credit where it is due.
In the case of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, announced on Monday in Stockholm, the committee got it right.
All too often, the awards go to academics whose obscure research have little real effect on the rest of us who share this blue planet on its trips around the sun. They are seen as irrelevant, if not insignificant. On Monday, however, three scientists from Japan, China and Ireland, whose discoveries have led to the development of potent new drugs to fight parasitic diseases such as malaria and elephantiasis, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Irish-born William Campbell and Japan’s Satoshi Omura won half of the prize for discovering avermectin, a derivative of which has been used to treat hundreds of millions of people with river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis.
China’s Youyou Tu was awarded the other half of the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has slashed malaria deaths and become the mainstay of fighting the mosquito-borne disease.
Putting the award in context, some 3.4 billion people, most of them living in poor countries, are at risk of contracting these parasitic diseases. Kudos to the trio and kudos to the committee for getting it right this time.
