Wow.  A Nobel Prize!

I am pretty sure I told you that I had hoped to win one of those when I was a tyke.  Until I found out that engineers aren’t the ones who get them.  These awards are for the “pure” sciences, not for the folks that convert those cold hard facts into useful items.  Enough grousing.

Back in the infant days of the dialysis industry (HR 1 had not yet been passed, so there was no federal funding for the program), it would not be unusual to warn visitors to dialysis clinics to ensure that their hands ALWAYS remained firmly in their pockets.  Because the clinics were overrun with what was then called “non-A, non-B” hepatitis.

Back during World War II, two main varieties of hepatitis (viral disease) were identified.  The first (Hepatitis A) was contracted from ingesting contaminated food or water.  Thankfully, this disease did not permanently damage humans,  There was a second- which involved body fluids and blood- and it was often undetected for years, until it manifested itself as liver cancer of cirrhosis (scarring of the liver). When the actual virus was identified in the 1960’s by Dr. Baruch Blumberg (who received the Nobel Prize for this, too), it became clear that this virus was not the only cause of the blood-borne infections.

Harvey Alter (NIH, Rockville, MD) recognized a viral agent that was the cause of the other infections- which was creating havoc in blood transfusions and dialysis centers. (The infection rate was about 30%- almost 1/3 of blood transfusions led to the development of hepatitis in the recipients.) This agent became known as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis.

For decades this was the only description, until Michael Houghton (then at Chiron, now at the University of Alberta) used human antibodies to identify the mystery pathogen- and then sequenced it’s genetic code- and led to a blood test by 1990.

The development of this blood test and it’s widespread availability in 1992 meant that I was finally allowed to donate blood. Until then, with all the non-A, non-B Hep C prevailing in dialysis clinics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I was barred from providing blood to anyone- even though my blood type is rare.

By the way, Dr. Houghton was nominated for the Gairdner Prize in 2013 (along with Harvey Alter).  Instead of being happy having been granted this “baby Nobel Prize”, he was pretty incensed because Drs. George Quo and Qui-Lim Choo also provided critical effort to identify the virus.  Dr. Houghton felt they deserved the Gairdner Prize along with him- so he refused it!  (Folks are guessing that the Nobel Committee this year felt compelled to stick with their rule of 3 [only 3 folks at most can win one Nobel Prize], omitting Quo and Choo, and daring Houghton to refuse this award.)

But the work of Alter and Houghton (And Quo and Choo) was unfinished.  These folks left it to Charles Rice (Washington University, St. Louis, now at Rockefeller Institute) to prove that it was a single pathogen, a virus that was contaminating the blood transfusions and the blood of dialysis patients.

We even have a (very, very, very) expensive cure for this disease now- which is good news for the 70 million folks  (95% success rate)  who have the disease (and will hopefully attenuate the 400K who die of it each year.).   But, these three eminent scientists were not the ones who developed the cure for Hepatitis C.  Their identification of the pathogen made that possible- and for that the Nobel Committee awarded the three the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

By the way- if you want to recognize how far scientific research has progressed, consider the fact that it took decades to identify and sequence the causes of hepatitis- and develop a cure.  And, it took weeks to sequence SARS-CoV-2 and a few months more to develop a vaccine.

Share this: