The first of this year’s Nobel prizes has been awarded, for medicine, and it has gone to a trio of researchers for work against parasitic diseases
ADVERTISEMENTThe first of this year’s Nobel prizes has been awarded, for medicine, and it has gone to a trio of researchers for work against parasitic diseases.
“The Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute has today awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medecine with one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites and the other half to Youyou Tu for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria,” was the citation at the awards ceremony.
Youyou Tu’s discovery is perhaps the most remarkable, as a Chinese woman working in China, and using traditional Chinese medical records, she rediscovered an ancient plant-based treatment for malaria that worked where modern therapies failed.
Campbell and Omura’s was a more hi-tech approach against the debilitating roundworm, which can decimate cash crops and infect and kill humans almost anywhere in the world.