Opening Doors Worldwide Through Medical Science
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
Title |
| |
Title of Series | ||
Number of Parts | 340 | |
Author | ||
License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International: You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
Identifiers | 10.5446/45062 (DOI) | |
Publisher | ||
Release Date | ||
Language |
Content Metadata
Subject Area | ||
Genre | ||
Abstract |
|
00:00
Computer animation
01:30
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
02:45
Computer animationLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
03:19
Computer animation
03:53
Meeting/InterviewComputer animationLecture/Conference
04:21
Meeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
05:06
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
05:41
Meeting/Interview
06:34
Computer animation
07:53
Meeting/Interview
08:34
Meeting/Interview
09:59
Computer animation
10:35
Computer animationLecture/Conference
11:15
Computer animationLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
12:04
Meeting/InterviewComputer animation
12:32
Computer animationMeeting/Interview
13:04
Meeting/Interview
13:33
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
14:13
Meeting/Interview
14:45
Lecture/Conference
15:15
Meeting/Interview
16:14
Meeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
17:09
Meeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
18:01
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
18:50
Meeting/Interview
19:53
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
20:33
Meeting/Interview
21:51
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
22:28
Lecture/Conference
23:00
Meeting/Interview
23:31
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
24:15
Lecture/Conference
24:56
Meeting/Interview
26:09
Lecture/Conference
27:13
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
28:17
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
28:44
Meeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
30:24
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
30:56
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
31:47
Meeting/Interview
32:38
Lecture/Conference
33:07
Meeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
34:00
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
34:45
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
35:15
Meeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:14
Good morning. I'd like to show a few pictures to start things running, just a little background.
00:25
It's not commonly recognized in the United States how poorly we're perceived throughout much of the world, but the facts remain. This survey from a few years back shows that in general citizens of five moderate Arab countries, Muslim countries, do not find the US
00:46
favorable in general. If you look at the third row here, you'll see that when the same individuals are pulled for their view of the United States with regard to science and technology, the majority see us very positively. I think the same is true of Western Europe
01:03
and other parts of the developed world. What we do in terms of science and technology is widely pursued in a positive manner, and I think it is a door opener in terms of our relations for the rest of the world. Now, I didn't start my career as a gray-bearded old man with arthritic knees. I was about like you.
01:25
So the scary part is in about 40 or 50 years you're gonna look like that, like this. But that's alright. It's part of the process. We're part of the same fabric. I'm at the tail end and you're at the beginning. So I started my scientific career with the idea
01:41
I was going to go into global health, and I got sidetracked in the laboratory. I also got married and had a family, and both were wonderful activities which have greatly enriched my life. This is my wife Mary and our son, and we had discovered a novel protein in red blood cells which we were convinced would be important, but we had not a clue what that importance was due to. We were stuck.
02:05
So how do scientists compensate when they're stuck? They're hung up on a problem. They talk to other scientists. I talked to a lot of other scientists and nobody had a clue what this new protein did. And then a very wonderful thing occurred. Yesterday we discussed with the students the work-life balance, family and work.
02:23
How do they fit together? Well, my wife Mary, who's shown here, thought every year we would go camping in the national parks. It's a vacation we could afford on an academic salary. It was a lot of fun. The kids enjoyed Yellowstone, Glacier Park, Yosemite. And after a few years, we asked them which national park they would like to go to next year, and they all yelled Disney World.
02:45
Which is not a national park, but we went to the Everglades, and we went to Disney World. And on the drive back, we stopped in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I chatted with a former colleague, a professor of hematology. And I told him about this new protein, and he had an idea. I said, Peter,
03:00
this protein is in red cells, renal tubules, homologs are expressed in tissues and plants. Have you considered this might be the long-sought water channel, something physiologists had searched for for a century? I had never heard those two words together, water and channel. It was John's idea, and it caused us to do a whole lot of work. It explains how some
03:22
membranes are highly freely permeated by water, as shown on the top right panel, whereas most cell membranes have a finite degree of leak through the lipid violator. And there are a number of parameters. I'll skip over here. It explains also
03:40
why water movements in our bodies are so important. While we're here over the next 40 minutes, we'll all be synthesizing and releasing cerebrospinal fluid in our brains and reabsorbing it at the same rate, a perfect balance. Excess spinal fluid will cause hydrocephalus. In settings of head injury, brain edema results. So the movement of water is precisely maintained by these aquaporins.
04:05
And it led to a very pleasant phone call in October of 2003 when a pleasant voice with a Swedish accent asked, called at five o'clock in the morning and asked, is Professor Peter Agri available? I said, he sure is. I'm Peter. And they explained that I would share the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Chemistry, my worst subject in high school.
04:28
I was imagining my high school chemistry teacher aspirating his morning corn flakes when he heard the news. But they said in 10 minutes there'll be a press conference teacher to get ready for your day.
04:41
And I ran for the shower and my wife Mary called my mother back in Minnesota. My dad was a chemistry professor. He died eight years before. My mother, a farm girl with no university education, learned the news, thought for a moment. She said, Mary, tell Peter that's very nice, but don't let this go to his head. I think she felt I should still do something useful. And I think that's actually good advice.
05:05
You can't control the extent of the celebration. This is the discount liquor store of the neighborhood. The implication that I was their best customer is a great exaggeration. I'll turn that one. And here we were on the podium after the Nobel Awards. My wife Mary, our four children,
05:23
myself and the award. And it's a great event. I encourage you all to answer the phone if it rings early in the morning in October. But in truth, there's so much fantastic science ongoing that they pick an individual or two or three and award the prizes. But this is really a recognition of all of the work in the field and a recognition of science worldwide.
05:47
So I think we should see the Nobel in one way as basically great PR for what we all want to do with our lives, do science. So at that point we had changed directions. In science, you're not obliged to follow the same path you started with. You can switch paths, switch careers. And we've gone back to the idea of doing global health.
06:06
I started working on malaria, which is a huge problem worldwide. We discussed this yesterday morning at the Africa breakfast. In the yet to be developed parts of the world, malaria is a huge burden
06:21
causing the deaths of almost a half a million children, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. And that's the adventure I've joined. We're working in a number of countries. I'll just stream through this quickly. In Zambia, where good efforts are leading to good results. Here's our team of Zambian and Zimbabwean scientists, and they do field work
06:40
taking care of the poor, or very vulnerable, pregnant women and children. The children are working, but they know how to have fun. And they're greatly revered. These families give all of their resources to the raising of the children. But when they're stricken with malaria or other problems, diseases, tuberculosis,
07:00
pneumonia, everything comes to a screeching halt. Here's a little boy rescued from malaria. He was near death, cerebral malaria. His life was saved, but notice the disconnected gaze. It's because he's blind. We'll never see again. So the statistics fail to tell us how serious the disease is in that half a million dead, but many million survivors will never have normal lives.
07:27
So great progress is being made. This just encapsulates the results in Southern Zambia, which will probably within the decade be malaria-free for the first time in recorded history. We're also working in Zimbabwe. Now those of you who know African history, Zim and Zam,
07:44
were originally sister states of the British colony of Rhodesia. They've gone different directions due to the politics. Zambia, liberal democracy. Zimbabwe, basically a one-party rule by Robert Mugabe, whose rule finally ended last year.
08:01
So you might quickly come to the assessment. How can you do field research in a country with an autocratic leader? Basically police rule. And the answer is sometimes you have to resort to some Machiavellian approaches. Shown here I am with Shungu Minati, a very well-trained Zimbabwean scientist. She turns out to be Robert Mugabe's niece.
08:24
It's okay. We're not there for politics. We're there to do our scientific work, and Shungu is a superb colleague and allows us to work in the country. It was once the richest country in Sub-Saharan Africa, but I think because of the difficulties in the political system, the economics have declined and so has public health.
08:45
The people lead very modest lives in the countryside, and in the rainy season, every morning the rural clinics are jammed with mothers taking in their children with malarial fevers. It's a huge burden and something we can do a lot about. We're also working in Congo.
09:02
Congo has severe problems, political problems leading to social disruption. It was the breakaway province for a long time, and the donor nations are now providing aid, but the distribution of this aid in terms of the medicines is difficult. Oftentimes the medicines are hung up in warehouses. We need to figure out a better way to get them to the countryside,
09:23
but it's not easy because Congo, which is eight times as large as Germany, has no road network with paved highways. We need to get ferried about by bush pilots such as this man Dan Carlson. The countryside is marshy, it's swampy, lots of mosquitoes and lots of malaria.
09:41
Here we are in one village with the village leaders. Their dedication to improving the lives of the children is very impressive, but these poor youngsters, in a typical year, 80% of them will have malaria. One or two may die and the survivors are scarred for life. Another topic which I hope we'll talk about today with Mark is science diplomacy in a more traditional manner.
10:07
We all know that our countries have diplomatic cores, but they also have a secondary diplomatic core, and that's all of us. Scientists are welcome around the world in places where our politicians are not welcome.
10:21
I'm going to skip real quickly, such as Cuba. For many of you, entry to Cuba was unrestricted, but for members of the United States it was highly restricted because of our own government. We'd had scientific collaboration for a long time in terms of the yellow fever campaign, but with the Cuban Revolution things stopped. But one of the benefits of the Cuban Revolution was a revival of Cuban science.
10:44
They have modern biotechnology, a very vibrant biomedical enterprise, and Fidel Castro, shown here, who is largely reviewed as a hard-minded individual, now deceased, has a son named Fidel Castro, who unfortunately is also now deceased,
11:04
who is his son, who's a physicist, brought a delegation from Cuba to the Lindau meetings about three years ago. They want to be part of the international scientific conversation. I was allowed to speak at the University of Havana. The podium was swarmed afterwards. I don't expect that this morning. I'm not asking for that.
11:25
But these young Cuban science students love science, and they want the opportunities that most of us have taken for granted. We need to welcome them. I also visited Iran, the Islamic Republic, for a lecture trip. But Iran has some political
11:41
difficulties due to the strict Islamic law. But what is not oftentimes recognized in the press, that amongst its leaders are people who have been trained in the West that are very open-minded, such as Ali Akbar Salehi. Salehi was the foreign minister of Iran during the Ahmadinejad regime.
12:01
He got his scientific training at MIT, where he was a classmate with Ernest Moniz, shown here. Ernie Moniz was the Secretary of Energy in the United States following Steve Chu, or Steve Chu from this meeting. And it was their friendship that really catalyzed the nuclear agreement between the countries, Iran and the United States. And finally, North Korea.
12:21
Just show some pictures. North Korea is again in the in the news. It was in the news not too long ago when the first well-known American visited North Korea. You never know who's invited. But it's a cruel repressive regime. It's in many ways a facade. It's somewhat of a ghost town, Pyongyang.
12:42
But the Korean scientists, the North Korean scientists, have the same view in mind that we have. They want to make the world a better place through science. There's a university that is now open for business, an English-language university in Pyongyang, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. A wonderful institution and the gift of a wealthy Korean-born businessman.
13:04
It's a little different. I don't think anyone would describe the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology as a party school. But the young people there have the same scientific objectives in mind. There is a observation that intelligence makes it a little austere, but the friendships that emerge are very vibrant.
13:26
So I'd like to turn off the slides and Mark, I've gone over my 10 minutes. I apologize. I owe you a beer. Well, I owe the young scientists time to ask questions, so I'm just gonna
13:41
ask a few. The only thing that immediately struck me as, if not debatable, open to discussion is this question of the same scientific objectives. You say you find that everywhere. Is that different from the same scientific conditions and how did the two relate?
14:02
Well, conditions in terms of opportunities are completely different in different countries and basically the countries with wherewithal with resources, Germany, United States, Australia, have vibrant scientific opportunities in terms of laboratories, universities. The poorer nations make investments,
14:22
but they have much less resources to put into it. But I dare say that the spirit of science, a talent that most people in the public don't have, but for some reason we have that. We share that. It makes us a community. We're interested in how things work. How do we manipulate those things to improve the lives of others? And I think that's what we share.
14:45
I'm still gonna press on this because I can see conditions might be interpreted as resources available, but conditions are also the the spirit of inquiry that's permitted. You've talked about nations with very different political contexts.
15:03
We ourselves are going through a nation going through a different political context. So how much has that affected your capacity to do this scientific diplomacy? That's an excellent question. My hero was Linus Pauling, a scientist who used to attend the Lindau meetings.
15:21
He passed on about 25 years ago. But he was a brilliant scientist and a humanitarian. Directly in the McCarthy era, which was in the 1950s in the United States when science was zooming ahead, our State Department was zooming in the wrong direction due to the repression from a single US senator named Joe McCarthy.
15:42
Pauling's passport was confiscated. He was forbidden to travel to the United States. This is the reason his calculations allowed him to predict that DNA was a helix, a triple helix, off by one because it couldn't make the trip to London to observe the x-ray diffractions of Rosalind Franklin.
16:00
So there are penalties that regimes can place upon us, even in the United States. And I hope not in other countries, but I'm sure to some degree there is that repression. And it does affect us, but we're relentless. We, the scientists. Yes. I'm taking the privilege of speaking for all of us. Anybody who disagrees, I'd be glad to meet with
16:23
afterwards. Well, now I'm going to open for the discussion we all anticipate and the energetic arm waving here is the first question. And if we get a microphone to you, then we'll be all set. And would you mind standing? Good. Hi, my name is Ela. I'm a postdoc at Yale.
16:46
Actually, just like you said, the objectives are similar, which are global health. I was wondering how you knew exactly how to navigate your path to, you know, to start your work in malaria in the developing countries.
17:06
Sure, that's a fine question. I think it's sometimes assumed by the younger scientists that there's some algorithm in our heads which tells us which direction to go. Now John Walker, is that true? Yes.
17:24
Thanks, John. I have to ask the question in a negative way. I think there's also a matter of going with the flow. When nature serves you up something, you can choose to ignore it, or you can choose to look at it and evaluate it further.
17:43
And there's a point where you might even commit part of your effort or all of your effort. So I'm of the latter type. I follow things that catch my interest. Journalists once asked me, don't you identify with Albert Einstein? I said, no, I actually identify more with Huckleberry Finn.
18:02
There's an adventure, and sometimes things turn out, and that's what you pursue further. And if the path is blocked and you can't solve it, you find something else to work on. So you refuse to give them a formula for how to proceed? I don't know where that formula is. I probably have some version of the adult
18:22
attention deficit. I'm gonna deliberately look in the back area in case there's a question. Yes, please. And again, a microphone. Hello, sir. I was wondering that how is artemisinin conjugated therapies are going to help, and since the malaria parasite is self-evolving with the
18:45
humans, so how is it gonna work in the future? So the question has to do with the miracle drug, the artemisinin, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded 2011, I forget, to you from China. It was a
19:01
traditional Chinese medicine, an extract from the roots of the Artemisia plant, which in traditional Chinese medicine was used to treat fevers. Of course, back then they didn't have diagnostic regimens to tell them what the fever was. And it's been revolutionary in terms of the treatment of malaria because the
19:24
previous medicines, chloroquine in particular, became less useful due to drug resistance. So the artemisinins in combination with other agents are amazingly effective, but resistance is now appearing in Southeast Asia. So we're concerned if that resistance
19:41
increases and passes to Africa, that we'll be back where we started with an epidemic which is out of control. Did I answer your question? You're welcome. Want to look here? Yes, please, if you'd stand up and again wait for the microphone.
20:04
My name is Haytham. I'm a film orgy resident in Oman. I find you brave to change paths from the aquaporins to turning all the way to malaria. Did you find it difficult? Did you
20:21
face challenges from your peers, from the family, even in the medical field changing from one specialty to the other, it can be really difficult. Thank you. Thank you for your question. It's a great question. In fact, my original objective was to get into global health.
20:40
The 25 years I spent in the laboratory working on aquaporins resulted because the first diseases we were studying while I was a student were cholera and other diarrheal diseases. So, field studies were ongoing in the early 1970s. Cholera was understood at a molecular level. There's a toxin secreted by the Vibrio and
21:01
E. coli diarrhea were thought to be due to a similar toxin. So I was studying him in the lab and had the revelation that actually I wasn't that bad at lab research. So it was a pleasant time, but it was 25 years and I felt we'd answered the questions that we were well suited to answer and others were studying other parts of
21:21
the aquaporins. And there's no ownership in science. You publish it and it's part of the scientific literature. So the only pressure I got was my wife who's been tremendously supportive. I've shown her picture. She felt it was pretty worthwhile that I'd be able to support our children and put bread on the table. And the positions were available. So there was actually no concern on my part.
21:43
I think we did what we could. And science is about new adventures. It's not about replowing the same field. You see these famous musicians from past generations making tours of smaller and smaller cities, singing the old hits from 1955. I didn't want to do that.
22:02
And I think malaria is a huge problem of great importance. And if I can make some small contribution, now and largely as an administrator raising funds, helping train young people. We have here at this meeting Marissa Haast, one of our malaria workers from Johns Hopkins. You can ask her if this is a weak field to enter and I'm sure she would argue that
22:24
it's a very important field to enter. I'm going to underscore one part of this question, which is did you find resistance? One of the extraordinary good and bad things about our age is it's an age of specialization. And so people put you in the box you may have started
22:42
initially in and then don't expect you to leave that box broadly, but you don't seem to recognize the existence of the box. Was that tough to do to make that leap? So there was some pressure that at one point I was a biomedical researcher at Johns Hopkins and felt I wanted to go in a new direction. And
23:06
the opportunities at Hopkins were limited. I was offered a vice-chancellorship at Duke University, a wonderful university. So I chose to work there for a while and then further cultivate our work on malaria. And when I was offered the directorship of the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins, I took it. So it actually was pretty safe.
23:25
But I'm dealing with a situation that's a little different from yours. That's called the Nobel Prize. In the morning the Nobles were announced, the president of Johns Hopkins University came over to my laboratory. And until that moment, I had no idea what close personal friends who were.
23:44
It's amazing. And I became close personal friends with the president of Duke University. And they changed presidents of Johns Hopkins and we've become close personal friends. So there is a safety net. And it's not there through all of our careers. So there is some
24:02
bravery involved in making decisions where you have a guaranteed path to economic success. You know, turn that down to take on something rather risky. But people do that and that's why science progresses. I'm gonna now look over there. Yes, sir, and if you could get the microphone.
24:22
Hello, Afi, originally from Cameroon studying in England. I haven't been to Africa where you've seen the socio-political, socio-anthropological situation. How do you advise young scientists to be able to influence policymakers
24:40
to change their scale of preference towards research? Because it's not part of their scale of preference. And so we have to always lean to the developed world, but that's not the idea of self-sufficiency. We need to do it ourselves. Well, you raise a very important
25:00
question here. Now, I think we are very fortunate in the United States to have large support for the scientific enterprise. But the resources, while large, still not large enough to provide for the needs. And you may think African policymakers are difficult, but try dealing with Donald Trump. There's an anti-science atmosphere which is emerging.
25:22
And I think the answer is we must be relentless and approach the public in a non-confrontational way. If the public understands the value of what we're doing, they won't object to some investments on the behalf of science. But it's not easy and one individual can't do so much, but together I think we can create a voice. And I think
25:43
Sub-Saharan Africa is changing rapidly. The economies are growing and there is investment being made. And maybe the laboratories that are available now have very modest facilities, but they'll grow. You should see the laboratory I had when I started. It was basically an empty room with a table and a sink. The sink leaked. It wasn't so great, but things did progress.
26:05
But I think we must be relentless. Thank you. Yes. Can you? Thank you. Kinsley from Ghana. So you may know, or of course I believe you know, that for the last 10 years or so
26:26
there has been gradual progress against malaria. But in the last two years this progress seemed to have stalled. And particularly for Western Africa, Nigeria and Ghana, I guess they actually increased in the last year.
26:44
We're looking at your success in Zambia, Zimbabwe, where you actually tried transmission or the burden is really going down. I don't know what you're doing different over there compared to what is happening in West Africa. And my other follow-up would be
27:04
is either you or your group will be interested in collaborations for malaria in Western Africa. Thanks, Kinsley. This is really important. The World Health Organization had tracked the burden of malaria
27:20
as accurately as they could, which is there's some imprecision. But since the millennium has been a consistent decline every year, and for the last two years it's plateaued. Will it go up again, and what's causing it? And the answer is we don't really know. But our young people like Marissa who are doing field studies in
27:41
Africa are trying to sort that out. So in southern Zambia, it seems that the malaria burden is disappearing, but in northern Zambia on the border of Diyar Congo, it's not disappearing. There's something different. It's not all about what we're doing. It's probably a combination of natural factors, climatic change.
28:03
Mosquitoes may be present, but the actual species may be altered. So there are probably explanations for this, and we understand the explanations who might know what to do about it. It's a very grave concern. Thank you. I'm gonna look in this area. Yes. Could we bring back front, and would you stand? Thank you.
28:26
Hi, professor. I'm a postdoc from Hamhos, Munich. I'm actually studying the environmental epidemiology, so from the field of public health. So my question is you have you got your Nobel Prize and attend to the field of public health,
28:41
but is it possible to go from public health field to the Nobel Prize? To me, it feels impossible because, at least to my view, to my understanding, people who are studying public health or global health never actually made it to the Nobel Prize. So it's kind of frustrating for me to realize
29:04
this might be my last opportunity to attend this meeting. Well, the pathway to the Nobel is not guaranteed for anyone, and public health is clearly a
29:20
tremendous human need. We have technology which is well-established, which is on the shelf, and the citizens are not benefiting from that. And the application of sometimes rather standard not high-tech, but standard tech activities can lead to insight. And whether or not it results in a Nobel Prize is probably not something I would encourage you to think
29:43
about. I think if you get a Nobel Prize, you should be happy. You should celebrate it, but aspiring for the prize is not, I think, what we're really after. We're after here for the science. I mean, whether one or more of you win Nobel Prizes is not something I can control,
30:00
but certainly if you follow your heart, your instinct, with your eyes wide open, use your talents, you'll discover important things. And the prizes will be awarded. They're specified by the Nobel will. There's no prize in mathematics, for example. The economics prize is sort of a substitute, but as they say in Stockholm,
30:22
that's not a real Nobel. No one has turned it down yet. So do the best science you can, and we'll all thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for that very honest question.
30:43
I need guidance about how many more minutes we have. I'd like a few more questions. Is that okay? Six minutes, okay. That'll allow. I'm gonna look right in the center of those standing. Is there anybody there that you don't have to have a question if you don't? Okay. Back there, yes.
31:00
Can we get a microphone? Wave your hand. Yes, good. Hello, I'm a postdoc originally from Italy working in Germany. I was wondering, as you seem to have a bit left the aquapodine field, whether I can take it?
31:21
I can go on and investigate. Do you know? Well, do you think it's everything already was already discovered in this field or what's going to be can be still discovered, investigated? Is there any room for more discovery? And so another question regarding, so you moved
31:43
you to a more basic field to a translational field. So do you think this is something, I see this more and more, also for funding agency, it's somehow required. So you think it's something, it's a trend now that it's affecting, I don't know, the topic of science investigation? Well, the short answer is the first question, no. Second question, yes.
32:09
We don't know everything about the aquaporins, but I believe the insight that I have may not reveal the important questions, but you may have exciting new questions. Let's not assume we know everything. And the
32:23
movement to a translational field was something I always wanted to do. It was in part in my heart, and my mother reminded me of it. Do something useful. Maybe this is useful. I hope it is, but that's the best I can do. Thanks. Thanks. Okay, I'm gonna go to you. Please, would you stand at the microphone? Yes, thank you.
32:50
I am Vidisha from India. I'm a PhD student in pharmaceutical science. I just had a silly question. I was wondering that you did work on aquaforin and
33:01
malaria, so that is basically on physiology and medical science side. So how you got Nobel Prize in chemistry? Well, it's not something I applied for. I think there was probably a discussion in a closed room in Stockholm and the decision was made. I mean the rules of the Nobel will, something
33:24
for the well-being of mankind, recent. But I think if you look closely, about a third of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry are for the life sciences. Structures of proteins. Functions of nucleic acids. And our channel discovery, Roderick McKinnon studied
33:44
ion channels. He solved the structure of the potassium channel, and we discovered the water channels. And biological fluids are salt and water. So I guess that's chemistry. I'm not disappointed. I've been glad to have had the economics prize. Okay, I'm going to go toward the last questions among the latecomers. Okay,
34:04
right there. Hi, I'm Gal from Weizmann in Israel. I was wondering infectious disease that plague poorer countries receiving much less research and attention than other disease that plague richer countries. What do you think is our responsibility as scientists in this matter?
34:22
I think we have a fundamental responsibility to take care of problems of all mankind, and I think we all agree on that. The fact that we don't have malaria in the United States now is because public health efforts eliminated it over the last century and a half. There was malaria present in North America up to the Great Lakes region, but by simple methods,
34:44
the CDC, which was originally a malaria research and control agency, eliminated it. Infectious diseases affect the developing world, but they also affect the developed world. You should see U.S. politicians scamper when Ebola emerged and a case erupted in the United States.
35:02
We're in this together, and I think we all understand that. Thanks for your question. I'm gonna, I think we're unfortunately at the end of our time. You will see that this is one among many laureates who is very accessible. So I'm sure you'll welcome people coming up to you afterwards with their questions. Of course. So that being said,
35:25
just give me a two-minute lead to get out of here. So that being said, thank you all very much for coming, and of course, thank you.