Cynics, satirists and pessimists probably weren’t born that way. And they don’t aim a jaundiced eye at stars, rocks, trees, cod and cows, as a rule. It’s people who have persuaded them that Pollyanna was a few bricks shy of a load.
I admit to having gone over to the dark side in my view of the species. Take one look at news filled with Trump, Putin, ISIS and campus shooters and it’s hard to put on a happy face. But I am not completely without hope. I am, for instance, a sucker for awards. I religiously watch the Oscars and the Tonys, and watch with interest to see who’s won the National Book Award, the Pulitzers, the Pritzker, the Heisman.
Yes, I know. There’s a lot of politics and commerce in any such handing out of accolades. No such judgement is pure. And the proliferation of awards has reached the point of absurdity. There now appear to be awards’ ceremonies for greatest rap duet by residents of East L.A. Or for top country song written in a roadhouse in a zip code not containing Nashville.
Nevertheless, for a moment we pause to celebrate people who have actually created something or done something requiring intelligence, skill or imagination, something that has had the power to please or enrich the lives of their fellow humans. It makes a change from the everyday drone of misery and bad behavior.
And the great-granddaddy of all awards is celebrated one week each October, the Nobels. Who said high explosives never did anything to improve the planet? Clearly the Peace and Literature Prizes are tainted by the political bias and questionable taste of a few Scandinavian judges. The Economics Prize can seem a bit faddish as well. But Physics, Chemistry and Medicine tend to actually honor humans for using their brains in ways that make the species look sapient for a change.
Unfortunately, much of what the awards are given for nowadays is incomprehensible to laymen. Once Nobels were handed out for discovering a new element. Okay, we can all understand how cool radium is. But a recent chemistry Nobel went to “palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.” I’m sure it’s marvelous to have discovered that, may even improve life somehow, and represents ingenuity I’m happy to celebrate. I’d just need a tutorial to really appreciate it.
Monday’s Medicine Prize, however, is plainly marvelous, no matter how little science you ever had or now retain. An eighty-year-old female Chinese pharmacologist, Youyou Tu, discovered a drug effective in treating malaria, a ghastly disease that infects one child on earth every 30 seconds. The clue to the compound came from research into traditional medicine that uncovered a 1,600-year-old recipe for “Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One’s Sleeve.” Since the active ingredient of a plant called Artemisia annua was isolated and refined in 1972, the treatment has saved tens, perhaps millions of lives.
Two other researchers shared the prize with Tu for their work in a compound that treaties infectious disease caused by parasitic worms — river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, aka elephantiasis. Between them they infect as many as 150 million people. Like malaria, they are most common in poorer, tropical regions of the earth. Thanks to this research millions will not go blind or suffer debilitating deformities.
Satoshi Omura of Japan isolated a microbe in soil that he found near a golf course. I n an era of enthusiasm for synthetic, manufactured, engineered compounds, it is interesting that both these breakthrough medicines were derived from nature. They are throwbacks to the days of discovering a miracle drug in bread mold (penicillin, 1945 Nobel for Medicine), and a reminder that destroying the environment and dooming more and more species to extinction is likely to be bad for our health in the long run.
William Campbell, Irish by birth, made his contribution as a professor at New Jersey’s Drew University. Here’s a reminder that in a world of conflict, science knows no boundaries, with the winners of these prizes coming from China, Ireland and Japan. Campbell discovered the streptomyces avermitilis that Omura discovered was effective in killing parasites afflicting farm animals. When modified it wiped out parasitic infections in humans, adding a potent new weapon in the war against parasitic diseases.
This story will get two minutes on the evening news, compared to coverage ad nauseam of war, politics, egomania and idiocy, but the work of these three octogenarians has changed more lives for the better than Kanye, Khamenei, Assad, Hilary or Ben Carson ever will. As usual, Shakespeare said it better than anyone else could. “How far this little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a weary world.”