EDUCATION

Love of art and learning

Nobel Prize winner William Campbell speaks at Berwick Academy

John Doyle
jdoyle@seacoastonline.com
William C. Campbell, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, speaks to students at Berwick Academy about worm parasites. [John Huff/Fosters.com]

SOUTH BERWICK, Maine — Dr. William Campbell is well known as a man of worms. He's also an accomplished painter of worms.

Campbell visited Berwick Academy on Tuesday to discuss his work discovering a therapy to fight infections caused by roundworms, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015. He also discussed his love of painting, which he said is more than just a hobby.

"Some people focus on one subject and then have a hobby to sort of escape from their main subject," said Campbell, who lives in North Andover, Massachusetts. "I don't look at it that way at all. I'm not painting pictures to escape from the science that I do. I want to bring the science with me into the painting, and bring the two together."

Speaking before a packed house at the school's Patricia Baldwin Whipple Arts Center, the 88-year-old Campbell shared slides of his paintings, which reflect his passion for roundworms and other kinds of parasitic worms. His artwork features parasitic worms which he considers "beautiful."

Senior Nikhil Agarwal said he was impressed with what Campbell had to say about distributing drugs to fight onchocerciasis, commonly known as river blindness, a parasitic disease that has plagued remote communities in Africa, Latin America, and Yemen.

"A lot of people think about pharmacological companies developing drugs, and then kind of ignore the difficulty of the process of distribution," Agarwal said. "But I think Dr. Campbell emphasized that, and I think that's very interesting."

Mahesh Agarwal, also a senior, thought it was interesting that Dr. Campbell is also an artist. 

"We kind of think of art and science as separate, but he is both an artist and a scientist, and that's really rare," Mahesh said.

Around the time he received his Nobel Prize, Campbell said he visited the White House to meet President Barack Obama, who presented Campbell with a gift of a stuffed animal – a heartworm.

"I still have it," Campbell said. "It's my only stuffed animal. That was very special."

Many in the audience seemed surprised to learn Campbell did not start to study science until he was in high school growing up in Ireland. He said despite that, he had teachers before who inspired a deep love of learning.

"I had never heard, literally, of chemistry or physics," Campbell said. "But nevertheless they instilled in me a love of learning. Not knowledge necessarily to be useful – although of course it is useful – not just to show off, but just to have the satisfaction of knowing something you didn't know before."

"I thought it was amazing," said Berwick Academy senior Emily Allen. "I loved his whole approach to learning. He really has a passion, both in his artwork and his research."

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites" and the other half to Youyou Tu "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria."