06.29.06
If All Scientists Worked Like Dr. Kochi
An article this week in The New York Times highlighted the work of Dr. Arata Kochi, the Japanese chief of the World Health Organization’s global malaria program.
Dr. Kochi is, by all accounts, exactly the kind of role model that scientists around the world should look up to. He doesn’t soften his stance on combatting the global health crisis of malaria when it comes to the interests of business.
- In January, he attacked the drug industry, naming 18 companies that were selling artemisinin in single-pill form, and giving them 90 days to stop. Monotherapy encourages resistance, and if artemisinin was lost, he said, “it will be at least 10 years before a drug that good is discovered — basically, we’re dead.”
If the companies refused to conform, he said, he would disrupt sales of all their drugs by getting the W.H.O. to refuse to certify any drug they made for poor countries.
- For example, he wants to standardize mosquito nets so that, instead of a welter of competing styles that must be home-dunked in pesticide, a few makers of factory-coated nets, which kill insects for years longer, are left to compete on price. He dismisses “social marketing,” in which nets are branded and sold cheaply instead of being given away, as with an early Bush administration policy that flopped. And, despite the objections of environmentalists, he wants DDT sprayed inside huts to kill mosquitoes where they rest on walls as they wait for dark.
The question is, how many scientists are willing to ruffle feathers to get something meaningful accomplished? Would that extra risk be worth, say, losing your chance at tenure? Or losing your opportunity to move up to associate director of your company’s R&D department? How many scientists have lost their focus; become apathetic; become accustomed to accepting the status quo?
So with a gentle reminder from Dr. Kochi, maybe it’s time for some of us to focus more on getting results. After all, getting results is what really matters.
As I understand it, the major problem with DDT is the effect on the environment e.g. the loss of birds at the end of the food chain from egg-shell thinning , like eagles and hawks.Since DDT was banned , in this country at least,some of these birds have made a major recovery . Is there good evidence to suggest DDT has no environmental effect when used in the new manner ? Dr. Kochi should understand that being aggressive and abusive is not a substitute for scientific accuracy .
Ray Partridge