Question: After your studies, what made you want to specialize in a cure for malaria?

Julian Rayner answered on 15 Mar 2011:

Partly it was the scale and importance of the problem – who wouldn’t want to do something to help sick children in Africa who don’t have enough people standing up for them?

Honestly though, it was also partly just the biological question. Malaria parasites are really cool organisms, and the process of invasion of human red cells is a really complex one that happens incredibly fast – it takes less than a minute for the malaria parasite to latch on to the red cell, bind tight, then drive it’s way inside, where it is protected from the immune system and can chew up all the hemoglobin to power it’s growth. Cool biology, that still fascinates me today, 13 years after I started working on it.