An Impulsive Genius: Sir Ronald Ross
With six Nobel Laureates attached to its name at one point or another, St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College has a healthy track record when it comes to picking up Nobel Prizes.
It should not come as a surprise. While we cannot boast the ruthless efficiency with which Oxbridge churns them out (nor LSE’s knack for collecting the misfit ‘Nobel’ Prize in Economic Sciences), we did get there first and have been winning them since day one. Or at least day two.
Sir Ronald Ross received the second Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 “for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it”. In doing so, he became the first British Nobel Laureate; although he was originally born in India, his father a general in the English army.
On his father’s wishes, Ronald Ross was sent from India to enrol at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in 1875. It was a thing in the nineteenth century too. His interests spanned many subjects, however, and he continued to pursue these in his career, from writing poetry to composing songs. He was also a talented mathematician, which he put to use in developing models for the study of malaria epidemiology.
His Nobel Prize work would come as a result of serving in the military as part of the Indian Medical Service, upon the recommendation of his mentor, and ‘Father of Tropical Medicine’, Patrick Manson. Manson suggested India due to the easy access to malarial patients, although Ross would be relocated away from these patients to a cholera outbreak. Despite being limited in resources to put forth for scientific endeavour, Ross discovered malarial parasites in the gut of ‘dappledwings’ mosquitoes in 1895 and later showed the life cycle of the parasite by its transmission to infected sparrows through mosquito bites in 1898.
He would continue work on the prevention of malaria throughout his career, leaving India to take up a number of posts in the UK in the study of tropical medicine. This included becoming Professor and Chair of Tropical Medicine of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (the first institution of its kind in the world), and being the Director-In-Chief of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases (now a part of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine).
But Ross’s Nobel Prize was one of the earliest of many controversies surrounding the award of Nobel Prizes. While he was the first to show the life cycle of the malarial parasite, he did so in birds (upon the recommendation of Peter Manson). It was Italian zoologist, Giovanni Battista Grassi, who described the complete life cycles of three separate malarial parasites in Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, and Plasmodium malariae in humans. Most importantly, as a zoologist, Grassi was able to identify the vector of the human malarial parasite, famous to all medical students, the female Anopheles mosquito.
Ross deserved the Nobel Prize and accordingly received seven nominations in each of 1901 and 1902 (as well as a further one in 1904 from someone who had obviously slept through the ceremony two years prior as a result of missing their daily dose of quinine). But such a Prize would usually be shared and the money split between Ross and Grassi. But Ross was infamous in the scientific community as being a difficult and egotistical man. He carried out a defamatory campaign against Grassi, accusing him of fraudulent research and the independent arbitrator, Robert Koch, fully backed Ross.
So Ross won the Prize but would continue to have many feuds with the scientific community. He was jealous of his mentor, Manson, and notably did not thank him in his acceptance speech. It is also worth noting that Robert Koch won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1905, but he did not feature among either of Ross’s nominees for the Prize that year (although there was no suggestion of any animosity between the two).
Of course, if any of these criticisms are levied against Ross, we can always distance ourselves and say that he did not qualify at Barts. In fact, Ross gained his medical qualification as a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries (as did Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, although the Society were quick to close the loophole which allowed female applicants behind her). The Society were recognized by the General Medical Council as a legitimate alternative authority for registering medical professionals until 2008. Incidentally, Ross gained the qualification on his second attempt; there is hope for us all, as long as we act like jerks.
