MAN AGAINST MICROBES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 556, 8 January 1929, Page 7

MAN AGAINST MICROBES

SIR RONALD ROSS’S WORK

LIFE AND FORTUNE DEVOTED

The question of State pensions for great men may he raised in the House of Commons. There is a move afoot, backed by a number of M.P.’s, to urge adequate recoguitiou for scientists who have devoted their lives and their fortunes to the benefit of humanity. This is a sequel to the sacrifice of Sir Ronald Ross, the world-famous authority on tropical diseases, who Is offering his historic collection of notebooks, papers, and reports for sale iu order to realise money for the benefit of his children.

Though he has made discoveries connected with malaria that have saved millions of lives all over the Empire, he has never received a penny from the Government in recognition of his work.

The manuscripts he is offering for sale relate to his work on malaria, and include an account of his great discovery of how malaria germs are carried by a species of mosquito.

White Man's Grave

When Ross went out to India in 1894, malaria killed about a million and a-quarter persons in that country alone. It raged also in the Far East, In Africa, and in South America. It was this disease which prevented the building of the Panama Canal, and made the canal zone a charnel-house for many years.

Yet little or nothing was known of the way in which people caught the infection. There had been guesses at “damp air,” "poison gas arising from swamps,” and even at “bites of mosquitoes,” but there was nothing certain. They remained guesses. Desperate by Failure

There are some 500 species, and no one had the slightest idea which species was to carry the disease. Ross toiled alone In the blazing Indian heat, in turn exalted by his faith and made desperate by his failures. For some weeks he toiled almost as a man without hope. On every mosquito he dissected he spent about two hours each, going carefully over the various organs with his lens. And then, as though Fate had grown tired of baulking him. came the very mosluito for which he was searching—and triumph. It was August 20, 1895, "Mosquito Day,” as it is now called. An Anopheles mosquito settled on the w’all of Ross’s workroom. He captured it. It was different from those he had been working with.

“Only the stomach tissues still remained to be examined. I was tired, and what was the use? I must have examined the stomachs of a thousand mosquitos by this time. But the angel of fate fortunately laid his hand on my head, and I had scarcely commenced the search when I saw a clear and almost perfectly circular outline before me.

It was the ma’ \ ial y rrasite. Ross had won his great battle.