Vanderbilt University enjoyed early intellectual influence during the 1920s and 1930s when it hosted two partly overlapping groups of scholars who had a large impact on American thought and letters: the Fugitives and the Agrarians. During the same period, Ernest William Goodpasture and his colleagues in the School of Medicine invented methods for cultivating viruses and rickettsiae in fertilized chicken eggs. This work made possible the production of vaccines against chicken pox, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, Rocky mountain spotted fever and other diseases caused by agents that only propagate in living cells.
As a Travel Medicine specialist working from Lincoln Avenue and then College Street in Belfast, I had a deep respect for the university. At this time I became the personal medical adviser to Dr Ian Paisley M.P., M.E.P on travel related issues, because of his Missionary activities in the Cameroons. On 27th July, 2004, 7 years ago to the day I became his personal physician.
Three alumni of the University, biochemist Stanford Moore (B.A. 1935), economist and microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus (Ph.D. 1971), and former Vice President Al Gore have won the Nobel Prize. Four current or former members of the faculty also share that distinction: biochemist Stanley Cohen, physiologist Earl Sutherland, and pioneer molecular biologist Max Delbrück. Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Paul Greengard was a visiting scholar. Yunus was also a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
A Bangladesh native who earned a Ph.D in economics from Vanderbilt University, Muhammed Yunus returned to his homeland to become a professor. But after watching a famine devastate his country in 1974, he began pondering his role in society. “What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall,” he wrote. “Nothing in the economics theories I taught reflected the life around me.”
Dr. Yunus’ introspection prompted him to launch an experimental micro-credit enterprise in 1976 that would empower the poor to pull themselves out of poverty. The result was the Grameen Bank, formed in 1983. Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty is Yunus’ explanation of the micro-credit model that has spread to 50-plus countries and become a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
The concept – extending small loans to those too poor to obtain traditional loans – has resulted in millions gaining work in everything from weaving and crafting to farming and bicycle repair. The loans build a sense of community and individual self-reliance. They are granted to groups of five people, usually women. Two of the five receive funds up front, while the other three are given loans after the first two people make a few regular payments.
The success of the Grameen Bank – the repayment rate is a staggering 98% – has astonished experts and resulted in this internationally acclaimed and replicated method assisting the impoverished worldwide. Yunus’ goal is to put homelessness and destitution in a museum “so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.”