Profile of Janet Hemingway

Abstract

As the wheels of a biplane approach a desolate airfield in the Solomon Islands, a man wearing only a loincloth breaks through the brush, brandishing a spear and a flail. From behind the plane’s windows four biologists watch with wary eyes and silently map an escape route. “You’re thinking, ‘What am I supposed to do here?’” recalls Janet Hemingway, Director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, International Director of the Joint Centre for Infectious Disease Research, and a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. “And then you realize this is a welcoming committee.” Janet Hemingway. Photo courtesy of McCoy Wynne Photography. Throughout her career, Hemingway has tackled the problem of malaria transmission from many perspectives: She has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with villagers in tropical countries, performed basic research in molecular biology and biochemistry, uncovered countless mechanisms of insecticide resistance, and helped develop life-saving quinolone antimalarial drugs (1). In her Inaugural Article (2), Hemingway explores the increasing challenge of insecticide resistance in Anopheles gambiae and Anopheles funestus mosquitoes, malaria vectors prevalent in the southern African country of Malawi. The findings reveal that pyrethroids, the most effective antimalarial insecticides known to date, are under siege by resistant variants of Anopheles , and increased monitoring in the impoverished country is desperately needed to track the underlying mechanisms of resistance before malaria regains a stronghold. Hemingway was born in 1957 to a working-class family in the small coal-mining town of West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Her parents owned a corner shop and her grandfather worked in the mines. At around age five, Hemingway’s grandfather presented her with a pair of retired “pit” ponies that had pulled coal trucks in the mine but had never been ridden. “I was kind of plopped on top of one, and off we went,” she recalls. Much …