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With HIV, TB, Malaria, malnutrition, typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and cholera to contend with, you know Africans shouldn’t be forced to worry about anything else.

Unfortunately, as Africans start to live longer thanks to improved healthcare, diseases usually associated with wealthier nations are starting to make their presence felt.  The UN Global Cancer study, released in 2002, highlighted that over 50% of cancers were occurring in developing countries.  By 2020, they expect that number to go up to 70%.

Yet, because the perception is that cancer is so anomalous in Africa, people are diagnosed very late. “80 percent of cancer victims already have late-stage incurable tumours when they are diagnosed, pointing to the need for much better detection programs,” says the report.  There are over 11 million deaths every year as a result of cancer.

Raw scientific research is speculative, difficult and frequently obscure. It can be hard for funders to justify ongoing expenditure when the results are often unclear.

On Christmas day in 1984, one such piece of blue-sky research yielded results.  Carol Greider, then a graduate student working under the direction of Elizabeth Blackburn, discovered an enzyme responsible for constructing a genetic sequence found on DNA chromosome ends, called telomeres, which protects the chromosome from damage.

This telomere sequence, maybe likened to book ends on a library shelf, holding together the genetic material packed into the chromosome.  The discovery pertains to the enzyme  which maintains these book-ends, and which  is a fundamental biological mechanism present in nearly all plants and animals.  Without it, cells would rapidly age and degrade.  They called their discovery “ telomerase”.

Norman Borlaug, the father of the “Green Revolution”, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and celebrated by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the 100 most influential minds of the 20th century, died at his home in Dallas on 12 September 2009 from lymphoma.

In a cerebral interview in the Economist in 2007, Borlaug pointed out that global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation. The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contended, the more room you have left for rainforest.

In the 1960s India hadn't yet recovered from the Bengal Famine which left 3 million dead. Indian farmers in the 1960s produced only 12 million tons of wheat annually; significantly less than their population required. In 1965 M.S. Swaminathan, C. Subramaniam and B. P. Pal, along with Dr Borlaug introduced the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides to the subcontinent. Today India is a net exporter producing some 200 million tons of grain a year.