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Young World
Operation: Mosquito
K.S.S. SESHAN
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Ross set out to find what caused malaria.
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The Kolkata-born Ronald Ross was the first to win the Nobel prize for medicine in 1902 for his discovery of malarial parasite in mosquito. It is interesting to note that the discovery was made in a small discreet bungalow in Begumpet in Hyderabad.
Major Ronald Ross was posted as general duty medical officer to the regiment stationed in Secunderabad in 1893. Though a surgeon by qualification, Ross was attracted towards research in tropical medicine, especially malaria. He was much inspired by Dr. Patrick Manson, who was then a world renowned authority on tropical diseases. Dr. Ross had to face many hurdles as no one in the army hierarchy could believe that an ordinary medical officer was capable of achieving success in a lofty task like research in medical field, outside the medical college and without a research laboratory.
Initial explorations
He caught 10 mosquitoes, which had white stripes on their wings. He allowed them to feed on his faithful attendant Hussain Khan a proven malaria patient and later captured them all in a glass bottle. Ross dissected them and found the malarial parasite in the stomach of the mosquito. But later dissections showed no trace of the parasite. This baffled him.
On August 20, 1897, while he was dissecting the ninth mosquito, Ross noticed that malarial parasites were hibernating in the stomach wall. Next day he dissected the last mosquito and found similar elevations. To his delight he found spindle-shaped wriggling parasites.
The office of Ronald Ross in Begumpet, where he conducted the experiments on malarial parasites, is now preserved as a heritage monument where Osmania University runs the “Ronald Ross Research Institute”.
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