Katherine Fernández Sánchez

Chronicle

Doctor Manuel Elkin Patarroyo

bor on the year 1947

Nacionality colombian

study faculty from medicine on the university national from Colombian; studies from
postgraduate on yale university ( EE.UU.); doctorate on the Rockefeller University
(EE.UU.)

Professor at the National University of Colombia. Founder and Director of the Colombian
Institute of Immunology. Awards and accolades (among others): “Alejandro Ángel
Escobar” Award in the science category (1979, 1981, 1984 and 1986); Prize of the
Academy of Sciences of the Third World (Venezuela), 1990; Doctor of the Year
(France), 1994; "Leon Bernard" Award from the WHO in 1995 and "Personality of the
Year" in the field of Health in 2002 (Spain). Pathologist Manuel Elkin Patarroyo is the
best known and least conventional scientist in Colombia. Deeply committed to the cause
of science at the service of humanity, he has dedicated his entire life to the search for
vaccines against “orphan diseases”, which claim the lives of millions of people each year
in developing countries. Dr. Patarroyo has opened new horizons with the partially
effective chemical vaccine against malaria, which he created in 1986, and for which he
subsequently donated the patent to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, it
has not wavered in its efforts to find a 100% effective malaria vaccine. His vocation
comes from the dreams that his parents instilled in him in childhood. They considered
that the best thing a human being could do is to work for the welfare of humanity; and
that the most fascinating thing in the world is knowledge. Putting the two together, I
realized that what I really wanted to be was a scientist, and to work for humanity. As a
child, my parents gave me comic strips and children's books, among others, books
about Louis Pasteur. I was fascinated by this man, who dedicated his entire life to
disease prevention. Pasteur was my idol then and continues to be. In my years of study
at the Rockefeller University in New York, I observed the enormous imbalance that
existed from the point of view of scientific research. It is legitimate for developed
countries to focus their research on health problems that directly affect them. But the
diseases of developing countries have been practically forgotten or relegated to the
background. Being myself from a developing country, I decided to dedicate myself to
vaccines against the problems that most affect the peoples of developing countries,
such as malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis, leishmaniasis, cervical cancer, which constitutes
a huge problem, and many other infectious diseases.