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Royal Irish Academy - C. Campbell William

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139 pages

English

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In 2015, Dr William C. Campbell's quiet retirement changed abruptly when, at the age of 85, he won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In Catching The Worm - A Memoir, Campbell recalls his early life in Donegal and studying zoology in Trinity College Dublin, then moving to the United States to work as a parasitologist. While working with the company Merck, he helped to discover several drugs to control parasitic worms. One of those drugs, ivermectin, has spared millions of people from the devastating effects of river blindness. Through his memoir, Campbell provides a snapshot of growing up in Ireland before and during World War II, as well as insights into science, the arts, teaching, family and what really matters in life.

Sujets

Médecine

Parasitology

Ireland

Stephen Ireland

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Publié par	Royal Irish Academy
Date de parution	25 juin 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911479352
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Catching the worm
Towards ending river blindness, and reflections on my life
WILLIAM C. CAMPBELL with CLAIRE O CONNELL
Catching the worm: towards ending river blindness, and reflections on my life
First published 2020 Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2 www.ria.ie
William C. Campbell
Fasciola 1988 Johns Hopkins University Press. First published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 31 (4) (Summer 1988), p. 506. Reproduced with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Onchocerca 1988 Johns Hopkins University Press. First published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 32 (1) (Autumn 1988), p. 108. Reproduced with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
M&B 693 1990 Johns Hopkins University Press. First published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine , 33 (3) (Spring 1990), pp 389-90. Reproduced with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
ISBN 978-1-911479-33-8 (HB) ISBN 978-1-911479-34-5 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-911479-35-2 (epub) ISBN 978-1-911479-36-9 (mobi)
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency CLG, 63 Patrick Street, D n Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, A96 WF25.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Fidelma Slattery Editor: Helena King Indexer: Lisa Scholey Printed in Ireland by Watermans Printers Ltd

This publication has received support from

Royal Irish Academy is a member of Publishing Ireland, the Irish book publishers association
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
We want to try to offset the environmental impacts of carbon produced during the production of our books. For the production of this book we will plant 30 trees with Easy Treesie.
The Easy Treesie - Crann Project organises children to plant trees. The aim is to plant a tree for every child in Ireland. A million trees by 2023. This is inspired by and part of the Trillion Tree Campaign, which is a project of Plant-for-the-Planet to plant a trillion trees. This initiative is a development and continuation of the activities of the earlier Billion Tree Campaign, which was instigated by Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement in Africa in 1977.
Crann - Trees for Ireland is a membership-based, non-profit, registered charity (CHY13698) uniting people with a love of trees. It was formed in 1986 by Jan Alexander, with the aim of Releafing Ireland . Its mission is to enhance the environment of Ireland through planting, promoting, protecting and increasing awareness about trees and woodlands.
www.easytreesie.com
DEDICATED TO my family and friends, in gratitude for m y life and for their enrichment of its many years
AND TO my brilliant colleagues at Merck & Co. Inc. and at Drew University, with whom I was privileged to work
CONTENTS
A phone call that changed everything
Ramelton, County Donegal
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Dublin, Ireland
Madison, Wisconsin
New Jersey and other parts of the world
Stockholm, Sweden
Things learned along the way
Last words
Acknowledgements
Select bibliography
A phone call that changed everything
I wasn t expecting the phone call. I didn t even know that the Nobel prizes were being announced that day. But early on the morning of 5 October 2015, the phone rang in the house I share with my wife, Mary, in Massachusetts. The next moment, our lives changed.
I learned that I had been named as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for that year. The prize was shared with Professor Satoshi mura and Professor Tu Youyou for our discoveries concerning therapies against parasitic diseases. For Professor mura and me, that related to a new medicine- ivermectin-that is effective against the tiny worms that cause river blindness in humans.
The story of how ivermectin was discovered, how it became one of the blockbuster veterinary drugs against parasites and how ivermectin came to treat river blindness spans almost two decades. Starting in the mid-1970s, it involved more than 100 people directly on research, clinical trials and drug distribution. In 1987 Merck & Co. Inc. announced publicly that it would donate ivermectin free of charge to all patients who needed it for the treatment of river blindness. Thanks to the donation of the drug by Merck and the efforts of many dedicated agencies, the impact of that research has been huge. To date millions of people have been treated with ivermectin to avoid the disabling symptoms of river blindness, and the disease has been certified as eliminated in four South American countries and has been vastly reduced in sub-Saharan Africa. The human misery and loss that has been spared because of ivermectin is enormous.
That said, I was not in any way expecting the call that October morning. By then, I was 85 and I was well into an enjoyable retirement. The Nobel news brought me rapidly back out of it, and I soon discovered that being a Nobel laureate is not for the faint of heart. Since then, I have been kept busy, perhaps as busy as ever before.
The responses from Ireland to the news of the award were especially warm and enthusiastic-after all, it was the first time a native of Ireland had received the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. Indeed, the only other Irish Nobel laureate in any of the sciences was Ernest T.S. Walton, who had been my physics lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. He shared the Nobel prize in Physics in 1951 with J.D. Cockcroft, for his part in splitting the atom .
But I have struggled with the recognition of me as an individual scientist. In reality, the work that has had such an impact on river blindness in humans and on the prevention of disease in domestic animals involved a long progression of incremental steps, large teams and the wisdom of many people. To them, I am indebted, and I have felt the weight of that debt while reflecting on my almost-90-year journey: from growing up in rural Ireland to studying parasitology at Trinity College Dublin, then moving to the US to further my studies and subsequently building a career in the pharmaceutical industry.
Bringing together my memories and reflections has prompted me to think about the balance between those that might interest me, their main protagonist, and the aspects of my life that would have broader appeal. There is also the vexing question of who is gathering these stories and reflections: as I have grown older, I have slowly and imperceptibly developed a suspicion that we are, at some level, different people at different times. It is enough for me now, though, to simply hold fast to the concept of a personhood, inculcated in the mind long ago.
James Pope-Hennessy, who wrote on the life and work of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, noted, unsurprisingly, that Trollope s own Autobiography was an essential source for biographers such as himself. Initially, Hennessy found the Autobiography to be candid, artless, complacent, and truthful . On further reading, however, he came to the conclusion that Trollope s autobiography was both smug and deceptive . What he found especially frustrating was that Trollope had chosen to leave out an enormous amount of personal feelings and intimate events . In contrast, in the upcoming pages I speak often of feelings and emotions.
Ramelton, County Donegal
A Ramelton childhood
Our busy house was in the town of Ramelton in County Donegal, Ireland. There had been scattered early settlements in the region, but the beginning of the town itself coincided very neatly with the beginning of the seventeenth century. Though I had been born in County Derry (in Londonderry in 1930), I lived with my family in Ramelton throughout childhood and early adulthood. We lived on The Mall, in a terrace of houses by the estuary of the Lennon River, a short distance from where the waters flow into Lough Swilly and then onwards to the Atlantic Ocean. As a child, I would occasionally see boats arriving from England to disgorge their deliveries of coal. Over the years as the harbour silted up, the port traffic slowed almost to a complete stop, but the river remained the defining landmark of the town.
One of my earliest memories from childhood is learning manners in French from Mademoiselle Heckendorn, a Swiss nanny who lived with us when I was very young. To this day, I have no idea what her first name was. We called her Mademoiselle . She would teach myself and my brothers Bert and Lexie phrases in French-my sister Marion was still too young-so that we could ask permission to leave the dinner table, or the classroom. Puis-je quitter la salle s il vous pla t? Permettez-moi a quitter la table s il vous pla t? We were exposed early to the cultural concept of foreign language. I have no other memory of her brief presence in our lives, and have no idea of when or why she left.
Our house was one of two that adjoined my father s shop, R.J. Campbell s. The house closer to the shop was occupied by the family of Sam Buchanan. He was manager of the four or five counter-hands who worked in the shop, leaving my father time to focus on the growth of the business, which was very successful. My father sold groceries, hardware and china, he bought and sold potatoes and grass seed for wholesale shipment and export, and he was meticulous in his dealings with the farmers. He had a black notebook and, when someone would come in looking to sell him grass seed, he would scatter some on the notebook s cover and examine them with a magnifying glass to assess the quality of that batch.
My father and mother would occasionally attend commercial s