MILLIONS OF LIVES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 109, 11 May 1933, Page 5

MILLIONS OF LIVES

HOW THEY WERE SAVED. RONALD EOSS’ GREAT WORK. Sir Ronald Ross, the man who revolutionised life in the tropics by the discovery that malaria is transmitted through the agency of mosquitoes, has left £7,403. He died last September. This great doctor, who had blazed a trail of discovery which has made habitable areas aggregating in size to a third of the world, has left this pitiful fortune, says the Sunday Express. He has also left behind him a document setting out his experiences as a pioneer in medical research of the difficulties and ingratitude he had to fight. Late in life, Ronald Ross was honoured by scientific societies all over the world. But these honours did not come in the form or early enough to save his health, as he had saved millions, or provide him with means enough to do what he wanted. This man who made life safe in districts where previously white men could not live, and who had saved millions of pounds for Britain, was so poor in his last years that he was forced to sell the manuscript of his epoch-making work to obtain money. Koch, the German scientist who followed in Ross’ footsteps, was given a pension for life by the German Government. Ronald Ross, the pioneer, the man who self-sacrificingly did not spare his health or his money all his long life, was given a belated knighthood by the British Government. Bitterly during the last thirty years, Ross had complained of the poverty which had crippled him in his great work. In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel prize. That helped him for a short while, for he did not spend it upon anything but his work. For years after that he was forced to take editorship of scientific papers and go on lecture tours to raise money to continue his work for the relief of others. Just after the war. the late Earl of Oxford and others raised money to endow a Ross Institute of Research in Putney, and there, still terribly short of money, he worked to his dying day. For years prior to his death he had been paralysed, yet every day he went to the institute to supervise the work in his laboratory.