Six early career African scientists nominated by the African Academy of Sciences have been selected to attend the prestigious Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting slated for June this year.
The 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is this year dedicated to Physiology and Medicine, will run from 24-29 June at Lake Constance in Germany.
The six will join 600 outstanding undergraduate students, doctoral candidates and postdocs under the age of 35 from across the globe to attend the meeting organized to promote networking between young scientists and Nobel Laureates. This year’s meeting will be attended by 43 Nobel Laureates – more than ever before at a medicine meeting – and participants from 84 countries.
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting for Physiology and Medicine is organized annually to provide a platform for early career scientists to interact with and be inspired by the best minds in the world. As an official partner of the Lindau Foundation, the AAS is invited to nominate young scientists every year.
The six are scientists drawn from Burundi, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda who were selected after a rigorous and multi-stage review process.
“Our nominations are part of efforts to prepare young African scientists and provide them with the support to develop their careers and enable them to provide answers to challenges facing the continent, said AAS Executive Director Nelson Torto.
Six early career scientists selected to attend Lindau meeting
Novartis renews commitment to malaria elimination, investing USD 100 million to research and develop next-generation antimalarials
Novartis announces a five-year commitment to the fight against malaria in conjunction with the 7th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria Conference and the Malaria Summit of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Further, the company releases new African research on progress and remaining challenges toward the 2030 malaria elimination targets, together with Elimination 8 and the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust program.
Over the next five years, as part of its commitment, Novartis will invest more than USD 100 million to advance research and development of next-generation treatments to combat emerging resistance to artemisinin and other currently used antimalarials.
The company will also implement an equitable pricing strategy to maximize patient access in malaria-endemic countries when these new treatments become available. In order to contribute to the WHO’s target of reducing malaria-related child mortality by at least 90 percent by 2030, Novartis will further help expand access to pediatric antimalarials and implement healthcare system strengthening programs in 4 sub-Saharan countries.
Africa crafts message of sustainability for international climate negotiations
Action on climate change and sustainable development together is the way forward for Africa. That is the top-line message that regional, public and private sector delegates will carry to international climate negotiations after a week of deliberations in the Kenyan capital.
Some 800 delegates from 59 countries, including ministers and other high-level government and international officials, together with non-state delegates, offered their insights into the challenges and possible responses to climate change, and harvested those insights for consideration in the official international climate negotiation process.
The collecting of views – under the banner of the year-long Talanoa Dialogue launched at negotiations in Bonn, Germany, in November 2017 – was a key part of Africa Climate Week that just concluded in Nairobi.
At the first regional Talanoa event since the launch in Bonn, delegates distilled their deliberations into key messages: public finance must be instrumental in unlocking private finance; carbon markets are about doing more together, and doing more with less; energy is a high priority, affecting everything, financial instruments should be put in place to de-risk investment and enhance involvement in smaller and medium-sized enterprises and achieving the SDGs, including the climate one is the only way forward
The top-line message of delegates that action on climate change is essential for sustainable development, was echoed in remarks by Erik Solheim, Executive Director, UN Environment, at the closing of the first Africa Climate Week, and of the Week’s cornerstone event, the 10th Africa Carbon Forum.
“We are engaged across most of the Sustainable Development Goals and clearly focusing on how to create synergy between the different goals and especially with the climate goal, which is essential for achievement of all the other goals,” said Solheim.
The UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda details 17 global goals covering poverty, hunger, health, education, climate change, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy, urbanization, environment and social justice.
Is there an entrepreneurial “Life Pattern?”
It is clear that the entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to any one religion. Other attempts to characterize a typical entrepreneur can produce abject futility when considering the life stories of numerous entrepreneurs. P. T. Barnum did not found the Barnum & Bailey Circus until he was seventy years old. “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was started by two graduate students who wanted to keep track of their favorite websites. In just a few years their company, Yahoo!, had a $1.5 million IPO.
Famous Amos built his million-dollar cookie empire using a recipe from the back of the Nestlé’s chocolate bag available to every baker and housewife in the nation. Sandra Lee, who risked everything on home-show demonstrations, finally got her own accessories line and a Food Network cooking show. Frederick Tudor made a fortune by selling the free ice from ponds and lakes around his home. A dentist, Dr. Thomas B. Welch, an ardent opponent of “demon rum,” created a nonalcoholic beverage that tasted like wine for use in Communion.
Hall of Fame pitcher Albert Spalding is better known today for the special baseball glove he designed and produced. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist who ran a health sanitarium, provided specialized cereal products for his patients in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was there that a sick cowboy who had lost his fortune in real estate scams, C. W. Post, got the idea for his own cereal company that would later compete with Kellogg’s company.
Many entrepreneurs grew up impoverished. Andrew Carnegie went from a “bobbin boy,” a child laborer in a textile mill, to one of the richest men to ever live in the United States. By contrast, J. P. Morgan sampled all the luxuries of his era in his youth, and his successful father arranged for his first job. He, too, amassed one of the largest fortunes in the history of the United States.
Some families even have a tradition of entrepreneurship. John W. Nordstrom started a Seattle shoe store in 1902 after his adventures in the Klondike gold mines. His three sons expanded the operation into the country’s largest independently owned shoe store chain. The next generation, John, Jim, and Bruce Nordstrom, took the company public as one of the most successful and admired clothing and shoe stores anywhere.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about these individuals, and thousands of other entrepreneurs, is that they have no life pattern. The old, the young, the idealistic, the pragmatic, the inventors, the innovators, the driven, the greedy, the compassionate, all characterize different entrepreneurs. Every successful entrepreneur, however, does have one characteristic in common with the others. The entrepreneur has faith and vision, in essence a driving motivation that infuses the individual’s commitment to at least one idea or product, and often more. For the true entrepreneur, challenges represent opportunities.
Indeed, it seems that entrepreneurs do not even see challenges in the same way others do. Consciously or subconsciously, entrepreneurs diminish the size of the hurdle to be cleared, or possibly some of them do not even perceive obstacles as existing at all. If anything, the traditional juxtaposition of the “glass half full” and the “glass half empty” does not apply to entrepreneurs at all, because to them, the half-full glass is already full.
Entrepreneurs do recognize serious threats to their concepts or businesses, but they seem to have an innate ability to separate genuine from perceived threats, which leads them to focus always on the most important issues. In turn, they pay little attention to competitors, especially in the early stages of their businesses. Most entrepreneurs concentrate so intently on their own product, idea, or operations that they have no time to worry about the actions of competitors. At some point, virtually every successful person, and certainly every entrepreneur, has been told “You can’t,” “It won’t work,” or “There are enough of those already.”
If Arnold Schwarzenegger had listened to critics who said that he could never succeed in acting with his accent, some of the biggest box-office hits in the world never would have been made. If Louis L’Amour had heeded any of the first 100 rejection letters he received, he never would have become the best-read novelist of all time of classic Western stories. And if a fourteen-year-old from Tennessee, United States named Jack Daniels had listened to his neighbors who insisted he be satisfied with the local moonshining, one of the best-known names in whiskey never would have existed.
While those people had persistence and determination, more than just hard work or a good idea is required to achieve success. A structural foundation must exist that ensures human liberty and a society based on law. Such notions as property protections, contract enforcement, copyrights, and other mainstays of free capitalist societies made it possible for Schwarzenegger, Daniels, and virtually all of the other entrepreneurs discussed above to take advantage of their own talents and abilities.
