Medicine: Sleeping Award

At his window overlooking the Ogowe River in French Equatorial Africa, Physician-Philosopher Albert Schweitzer wrote in 1914: "Many a patient have I had come to me crying out: 'Oh, doctor! My head, my head! I can't stand it any longer; let me die!' . . . Sleeping sickness now prevails from the east coast of Africa right to the west, and from the Niger ... to the Zambesi . . . Yet, where death already stalks about as a conqueror, the European states provide in most niggardly fashion the means of stopping it." To treat the disease. Dr. Schweitzer had only atoxyl, which he called "a frightfully dangerous drug."

But better ways to fight African sleeping sickness were already being developed. Back in 1906, Belgium's King Leopold II had offered a $4,000 prize for a means of delivering his African subjects from "this terrible plague." Working not for the prize but for humanity, investigators at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research began an intensive search for a cure. Drs. Walter A. Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger juggled chemical groups into new molecular combinations. In 1915, they found tryparsamide. Physicians Wade H. Brown and Louise Pearce concluded from tests on animals that this was just what they needed.

Dr. Pearce took tryparsamide to the Belgian Congo in 1920. At an experiment station in Leopoldville, she tried it on scores of suffering natives, found it both safer and far more effective than atoxyl. In the earlier stages of sleeping sickness, it can work a complete cure.

Last week, after sleeping on it for about 30 years, the Belgian government honored Leopold's pledge—and upped the award to $20,000. In Brussels, Dr. Pearce, 68, received from King Baudouin the lion's share of $10,000 and was made an officer of the Royal Order of the Lion. To Drs. Jacobs and Heidelberger went $2,000 each and the Order of Leopold II; to Dr. Brown's estate, his posthumous $4,000; and to that of Britain's late Dr. H. W. Thomas, who helped to develop atoxyl, $2,000. Despite the passage of years, no better drug than tryparsamide has been found for the sleeping death.