Juan Noé Crevani

Born in Pavia in 1877, Noé earned his doctorate in Natural Sciences from the University of Rome in 1898 and in Medicine in 1902. He studied parasitology and malaria under Giovanni Battista Grassi, the man who had described the parasite's full life cycle in the Anopheles mosquito.

In 1912, the dean Vicente Izquierdo Sanfuentes contacted him on behalf of the Chilean government to reform the teaching of medicine. He gave his inaugural lecture on 12 December that year and founded the chair of Medical Zoology at the Universidad de Chile. He ended up also teaching general biology, embryology, comparative anatomy, parasitology and histology.

From 1913 he began studying malaria in Tarapacá, Arica and the valleys of Tacna. It was no theoretical problem: malaria was depopulating the north, made farming in the Azapa and Lluta valleys unviable, and turned military service into a lottery.

The decisive campaign began in 1937 and attacked on every front at once: draining pools and marshes, oil spread over stagnant water, river channelling, a mounted anti-malaria brigade, Gambusia fish that eat the larvae, and, from 1944, also DDT.

In 1945 the last focus, in the Tarapacá ravine, was stamped out. Noé died two years later, on 22 January 1947, in Santiago. He had also researched miner's anaemia — hookworm disease — in the Biobío coal-mining region.