Poet-cum-Nobel winner Alter describes ‘nice upside-down’ win

Nobel Prize in Medicine winner Harvey Alter describes the 4:45 a.m. phone call he got from Stockholm as “the best alarm clock I’ve ever had.”

He says he ignored the first two times the phone rang before “angrily” answering it the third time, adding that his anger went away “in about a second.”

“It’s so kind of other-worldly,” he says. “It’s something you don’t think will ever happen and sometimes you don’t think you deserve it to happen and it happens.”

“In this crazy COVID year where everything is turned upside down, this is another nice upside down for me,” he adds.

Alter describes the journey to identifying hepatitis C as a decades-long effort. In a 1988 poem he wrote, “Let us see this elusive virus/If we don’t publish soon/They’re going to fire us!”

Here is that poem in full, for those into that sort of thing:

I think that I shall never see
This virus called non‐A, non‐B
A virus I cannot deliver
And yet I know it’s in the liver
A virus that we often blame,
But which exists alone by name
No antigen or DNA
No little test to mark its way.
A virus which in our confusion
Has forced us into mass collusion
To make exist just by exclusion
But is it real or an illusion?
Oh GREAT LIVER in the sky,
Show us where and tell us why
Send us thoughts that will inspire us
Let us see this elusive virus
If we don’t publish soon,
They’re going to fire us!

— With AP