Alan Jon Magill

Abstract

Leading advocate of malaria eradication. He was born on Nov 26, 1953, in Craig, CO, USA, and died from a heart attack on Sept 19, 2015, in Woodway, WA, USA, aged 61 years. Malaria was one of the diseases to receive a specific mention in the Millennium Development Goals. The goal in question: to see a halt in its rise and begin to reverse its global incidence by 2015. There are those who have wanted to aim higher than this target. One such was Alan Magill, the Director of the malaria programme of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer, US Global Malaria Coordinator who leads the President's Malaria Initiative, Magill had a unique role in arguing the case for a new and tougher target: elimination. “Alan helped to fertilise a transition from the limited ambition of the Millennium Development Goals to the more ambitious target of a world without malaria”, he says. “Alan was instrumental in changing the vision of a malaria free world into an achievable goal.” Not everyone in malaria believes that to eradicate the disease is yet feasible. Moreover, to concentrate effort on places where it might more easily be attained would make only a small dent in the annual number of malaria deaths. Hence a continuing tension between those who favour one or other of the two objectives. Like Ziemer, Christopher Whitty, Professor of Public and International Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, mourns the loss of Magill. “He was able to marry together the different and competing ideas about how malaria should be approached”, says Whitty. “He managed to talk fairly and reasonably to everyone. Everybody trusted him. Even if they didn't agree with him they thought that his judgments were sensible and helpful.” Magill began his career in the US Army, and remained with it for much of his working life. He'd entered the Army with undergraduate and postgraduate science degrees from Lamar University, Texas, and the University of Rhode Island respectively, and a medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine—where he also met his paediatrician wife Janine. After Magilll's graduation in 1984, the pair served together. Their first posting was to Honolulu where Magill joined the Tipler Army Medical Center. Next came Germany, and then Magill joined the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, on a fellowship to study infectious disease. He became Assistant Chief of its Department of Immunology, and held a series of academic appointments with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. Between 1996 and 1999, he headed up the parasitology research studies being done by the US Naval Medical Research Center in Peru. Here he worked on cutaneous leishmaniasis as well as malaria, and developed field sites for clinical trials of vaccines, drugs, and new diagnostic methods. Back in the USA, he directed clinical research at the NIH's malaria vaccine development unit before going on to hold various senior posts at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, including a stint as its overall Science Director. In 2009, he moved to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency where he directed a US$160 million programme on the development of innovative biological manufacturing facilities. Clinically he remained an attending physician in infectious disease at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda from 1992 to 2012. It was in 2012 that Magill was recruited by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to lead its work on malaria, and to articulate and drive forward its elimination programmes. One of the people who'd previously worked with him during the preparation of what became known as the Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA) was Professor Christopher Plowe, Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and outgoing President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH). “It [malERA] was set up to think about the research that would be necessary if we were going to have a chance of eradicating the disease. In particular, Alan drew up the research agenda around anti-malarial drugs.” Plowe describes Magill as warm-hearted. “He was also very humble, and he always considered himself to be a student of whatever he was working on. But he had an incredibly broad knowledge of malaria.” Whitty agrees. “He was very straightforward, and a very cheerful person. He was intellectually engaged by malaria, and committed to its elimination. But he fully understood the problems associated with that, and tried to create an intellectual framework to support it. The fact that he became President of the ASTMH reflects the fact that he was knowledgeable across the whole field, and not just in malaria.” Magill leaves a wife, Janine Babcock, and two daughters, Lara and Sarah.