Accidental Scientific Discoveries: Malaria

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The most amazing discoveries in science happen by accident and a disease known as malaria was no exception. Malaria is a recurring disease marked by severe chills and fever. It is transmitted to humans from female Anopheline mosquitoes and can be lethal unless treated. The mosquito bites an infected individual and takes a little bit of blood containing parasites and during its next meal these parasites are transmitted to a healthy individual, where they multiply and infect. Malaria is predominately found in poor regions, and can be the cause of the poverty.

The search for the cure of malaria was a long journey and it is believed to have started with the following legend.

Long time ago, a lonely Indian man was walking through a jungle in Andes. He was suffering from high fever and was very cold. He was thirsty, but the only water available was in a pool of still water. It tasted bitter but he was too thirsty to stop drinking. Nearby grew a tree, nowadays known as Cinchona. It is a native tree of South America, and in those days its bark was considered poisonous. But a miracle happened! Instead of feeling ill from drinking this water our hero was cured from the malarial fever! He brought the knowledge to his people, who called this bark quina-quina and they learned to use it to cure the malarial fever.  

The first ever mention of using the cinchona bark was in official records of community of Jesuit missionaries. It is thought that the people of our hero have passed on their knowledge of extraction of a chemical known as quinine from quina-quina to missionaries.

However, in Europe, another legend exists. It is believed that the Countess of Chinchon contracted malaria, while visiting Peru. She was then cured by this bark and returned to Spain, where she introduced it.

In 1742, Swedish botanist Carol Linnaeus named Quina-quina tree “Cinchona” in her honour, the only thing that was wrong with this legend was the fact that Countess never had malaria and she never reached Spain, since she died in Columbia.

Once the cure for malaria became world-known, the research on the quinine began. In 1820, two scientists, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph-Bienaime Canventou, isolated pure quinine from cinchona bark. In 1908, P.Rabe porposed its structure and in 1944 Robert Burns Woodward and William von Eggers Doering synthesized this chemical. However the cost of synthesis was too high for any commercial value.

As it is often a case the first synthetic drug arose from a great need. Most of the naturally produced quinine was produced in Java (now part in Indonesia). During First World War, Germany was completely cut off from a natural supply of quinine and was forced to develop a synthetic substitute called Atabrine.

Then during the Wold War II, when the production of quinine in Java was controlled by Japan,a lot US Soldiers fighting in North Africa and South Pacific contracted malaria. During that war Italian prisoners were taken and their belonging examined. Upon such an examination white pills were discovered. These pills were sent to be analysed to the US where they were found to be a synthetic antimalarial drug called chloroquine. This drug was synthesised in the same laboratory as Atabrine.  

Nowadays, chloroquine and Atabrine are used to prevent malaria. However, in some areas of the world the malarial parasite has developed a resistance to these drugs, but it can still be cured with the natural quinine.

To date no vaccine against malaria has been found and with the parasites becoming resistant to drugs all the time soon we might not have anything left to defend ourselves with.