When the news is making you feel particularly jaundiced about humans--when you read, for example, that some sweet harmless old lady is a former concentration camp guard--the perfect antidote is the announcement of the MacArthur grants. Every year, it's a genuine feel-good story (Atrios' mock bitterness notwithstanding): smart people doing good things get real (and helpful) recognition for their efforts. To read about the nominees is to be reminded that perhaps humanity is not utterly irredeemable after all.
I think my favorite this year is Victoria Hale:
Victoria Hale is a pharmaceutical chemist who combined individual entrepreneurship and social vision to found the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), a nonprofit pharmaceutical company with a mission to develop affordable drugs for neglected diseases that plague the world’s poorest populations. Applying years of experience as both an FDA official and a pharmaceutical executive, she created a model for drug development that is driven by the needs of the developing world....Focusing on potential cures for parasite-borne diseases, Hale and her colleagues acquire donated rights to promising compounds that have either been deemed unprofitable by the pharmaceutical industry or left undeveloped by research labs unable to obtain funding....iOWH recently received approval for and brought to market its first drug, paromomycin, a low-cost antibiotic cure for visceral leishmaniasis, which afflicts approximately 1.5 million people worldwide, primarily in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sudan. Treatments underway for malaria, diarrheal disease, and Chagas disease hold the potential to save the lives of millions more.A nonprofit pharmaceutical company. The model is simple and wonderfully elegant: taking the failings of the pharmaceutical industry and turning them into an asset. Most importantly, it seems to work...and it has the potential, as the MacArthur people put it, "to relieve human suffering on a massive, global scale."
So congratulations to Victoria Hale, and to the rest of this year's winners. Well done, and thanks for restoring some of my faith in people.
[That's all, folks]
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