Our Nobel Laureate, Dr. William C. Campbell

On 5 October 2015, the Nobel Prize winners for Medicine were announced in Stockholm. Half of the prize was shared by Dr. Tu Youyou, a Chinese medical scientist-pharmacologist, who searched the ancient literature of China in an effort to find a possible herbal medicine for the treatment of malaria. She was successful when she rediscovered Artemesia annua (sweet wormwood), a plant that produces the drug artemisinin. It was used more than 2,000 years ago for the treatment of malaria and is again widely employed in the treatment of malaria, especially in southeastern Asia. The other half of the Prize was shared by Satoshi Omura, a microbiologist at the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, Japan, and Dr. William (Bill) C. Campbell, a parasitologist at Merck Pharmaceuticals in Rahway, New Jersey. The Kitasato Institute was contracted to isolate “unusual” soil samples throughout Japan and ship them to Merck, where they were examined for...