Harvard-trained doctor David Sachar and Brigham and Women Hospital’s pathologist and senior lecturer Noel Rose have been recognized for their contributions to medicine with this year’s Golden Goose Award.
Sachar was recognized for experiments with frog skin that led to the development of oral rehydration therapy, while Rose was honored for using a rabbit to prove that an autoimmune response can cause a human disease.
The award is given each year to scientists selected by a bipartisan committee of congressional supporters and several science societies and organizations. The Golden Goose Award got its name from vocal critics of curiosity-led science, which can lead to transformative benefits to society. In response to claims that federal investments in such research was wasteful, a coalition of business, university, and scientific organizations came together with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2012 to recognize the importance of “blue-skies research.” Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) championed the idea of the Golden Goose as a fitting analogy, and it stuck.
Though most scientific research is carried out in universities and institutes with their own infrastructure, national funding stimulates exploration and keeps the enterprise competitive. It also saves governments from the financial, political, and social costs of sustaining vast research operations within their own brick-and-mortar facilities.
“Government-funded research is vital for America’s future and the future of the world,” Cooper said in a statement from AAAS. “Taxpayers have received untold benefits from breakthroughs that have lengthened and enriched our lives. Let’s keep progress on track by boosting funding for research!”
A simple solution
When Sachar graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1963, he was so inspired by his class speaker, Nobel laureate Thomas H. Weller, M.D. ’40, that he decided to dedicate his two years of government service to making a difference in the developing world.
“Weller said that if we worked very hard we could advance the average life expectancy of someone in the United States a few years at best,” he recalled. “Then he said that if we spent just one-tenth of those efforts in the developing world, we could advance life expectancy from age 40 to age 60. And I thought, ‘Yes, that is what I am going to do.’”
In places where the water supply is compromised, a large proportion of people who contract cholera die without treatment. The advent of oral rehydration therapy in the 1960s — a simple, low-cost treatment — was a game-changer that saved millions of lives. But it discovery was thanks to a collaboration among people doing seemingly odd things in very different parts of the world.