Albert Lasker
Clinical Medical Research Award

Award Description

Alfred Sommer
For the understanding and demonstration that low-dose vitamin A supplementation in millions of third world children can prevent death from infectious diseases as well as blindness.

Throughout the developing world, in Indonesia and Tanzania, in South Africa and Nepal, in virtually all countries where vitamin A deficiency was once common, millions of children owe their eyesight and their very lives to a visionary, persistent doctor from Baltimore. Alfred Sommer, winner of the 1997 Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, discovered that vitamin A, known to prevent blindness from xerophthalmia, also gives children the biochemical strength to recover from life-threatening infections that are common in most of the poorest nations on earth.

Xerophthalmia often begins with night blindness, which in some cultures in called "chicken blindness" because afflicted children mimic chickens' inability to see at dusk. As xerophthalmia progresses, "Bitot's spots" appear on the eyes—white, foamy or cheesy accumulation of tissue that is known as a sign of vitamin A deficiency. If vitamin A deficiency progresses untreated, the patients deteriorate and may develop eye ulcers that, as Sommer puts it, "eventually turn the cornea to mush."

Vitamin A deficiency is one of the oldest recorded medical conditions. The ancient Egyptians treated nightblindness with animal liver (where vitamin A is stored) 3500 years ago. By the early 1900s, the connection between xerophthalmia, overall resistance to infection and vitamin A was well-documented by American and Danish nutritionists who treated their patients with cod liver oil, butter, and whole milk. For all practical purposes, xerophthalmia was erased from the medical map in Europe and North America.