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The Nobel Prize for medicine has been awarded to Chinese scientist Youyou Tu this year, who gets half the award, with the other half being shared by William Campbell of the USA and Satoshi Omura of Japan. While Campbell and Omura win for their discovery of the drug Ivermectin used to fight filariasis and river blindness, Tu wins for her investigation on Chinese traditional medicine to unearth one of the most effective cures for malaria – artemisinin.

And that’s where the Indian connection comes in. The first malaria-related Nobel was awarded to Ronald Ross way back in 1902 for his discovery, while in India, of the parasite causing malaria. Ross was in the Indian Medical Service and held temporary appointments in Madras, Burma and the Andaman Islands. While on leave in 1894 he met Patrick Manson, who was the first to demonstrate that the same parasites could infect humans and mosquitoes, and the idea of proving Manson’s theory took hold of him.

Incidentally, Manson demonstrated the transmission of the filariasis parasite from mosquito to human. He also conducted malaria experiments by allowing his son to let himself be bitten by infected mosquitoes transported from Italy to England by Indian Mail. Manson’s son recovered after a dose of quinine.

Ross’s breakthrough came on August 20, 1987 in Secunderabad when he dissected the stomach tissue of an Anopheles mosquito and found the malaria parasite, which proved the role of the Anopheles in transmission of the disease. Ross continued his work on the malaria parasite and its full life history at a laboratory in Calcutta, an episode in history that forms the background for Amitav Ghosh’s speculative fiction novel The Calcutta Chromosome.

On making his breakthrough, Ross wrote a poem and sent it to Manson, the words of which are engraved on the northern wall of Kolkata’s SSKM (formerly Presidency General) Hospital:

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At his command,

Seeking his secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save,

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave?

The 2015 Nobel recognises the originality of Tu’s work and the efficacy of artemisinin at dealing with malaria, a disease that still takes half a million lives in tropical countries every year. The drug is sourced from a compound in a Chinese plant artmesinin annua, commonly called sweet wormwood.

The use of the treatment has not been has not been without controversy. Farm workers in African countries like Uganda have improved their resistance to malaria by brewing a tea from the sweet wormwood plant. The World Health Organisation, however, has frowned upon this practice for the fear that drinking the tea will cause parasites to build resistance to the drug.