Derry-born Professor William C. Campbell will today be bestowed with the honour of receiving this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine in a ceremony in Stockholm.
This year’s prize will be jointly awarded for the discovery of the drug ivermectin, which has proved a great success in treating diseases like river blindness. Mr. Campbell will share the prize with Japanese scientist Satoshi Omura and Chinese researcher Tu Youyou.
Professor Campbell will thus become the second Irish person to win a Nobel Prize for Science, after Earnest Walton was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics back in 1951, for his work on splitting the atom.