Learn English with the News – Nobel prize in medicine awarded to trio for work on hepatitis C

The Nobel prize is about to be awarded to multiple scientists regarding the research about Hepatitis C. But the nomination certainly has its controversy, as one of the lead scientists believes that the praise and compliments should be extended to all the researchers involved in the process.

Watch the video and then do the accompanying English language exercises.

The news is a consistent source of entertainment, knowledge and discovery that never ceases to exist and always comes out with more and more material each day. Because it plays such a vital part in our lives and is so important to keep up with, it is without a doubt a piece of your everyday routine that can’t go ignored.

Whether it is to understand the ramifications of recent legislation passed, to hear about recent events and grasp the potential consequences to your country, or simply hear about what is happening in other countries in order to compare them to what’s happening in yours, the news is certainly a staple in our lives and the most consistent way to get information.

This is why Scrambled Eggs has decided to unite two of your biggest worlds: learning English and keeping up with what is happening in the world. We hope our challenging daily exercises, composed of listening, vocabulary and comprehension exercises in English, will satisfy both of those above worlds in a satisfactory and also entertaining way.

So enough about introductions, let’s get to today’s Learn English with the News topic:

Adapted from this article.

Now that you’ve had a listen, let’s put your knowledge to the test with some of our vocabulary and comprehension exercises:

And that’s it for today’s English lesson, where you can improve your English with the news and current events. Do you have any comments or special requests for us for the next edition of Learn English with the News? Be sure to leave any feedback you have in the comments section below, as we would love to help you on your quest to learn the English language!

For other Learn English with the News segments, be sure to check out the rest of our posts:

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Full Text:

“Two Americans and a British scientist have been awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for their groundbreaking work on blood-borne hepatitis, a health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer around the world. Harvey J Alter at the US National Institutes of Health in Maryland, Charles M Rice from Rockefeller University in New York, and Michael Houghton, a British virologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, were honoured for their joint discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a major cause of liver inflammation. The award may prove controversial as Houghton recently turned down a major prize because it excluded two co-workers at the pharmaceutical firm Chiron who helped him identify the virus. In 2013, he refused the Canada Gairdner International Award sometimes known as the “baby Nobel” because it did not recognise the work of his former colleagues George Quo and Qui-Lim Choo. After reluctantly accepting the prestigious Lasker award in 2000, Houghton said his co-workers did not get the recognition they deserved. David Pendlebury, a citation analyst at Clarivate, a scientific data firm, said he was surprised the Nobel committee made the award knowing it would be problematic.  The difficulty, he said, threw into high relief the perennial issue of the Nobel’s rule of three, where no more than three researchers can be named for discoveries that have often been team efforts. The award, announced on Monday by the Nobel assembly in Stockholm, is worth £870,000, which will be shared among the winners. The scientists’ work transformed the understanding and treatment of hepatitis C. The virus infects more than 70 million people, with 400,000 dying each year from related conditions such as cirrhosis and liver cancer, according to the World Health Organization. In the 1940s, scientists knew there were two main types of infectious hepatitis. The first, transmitted by the hepatitis A virus, spread via contaminated food and water and tended to have little long-term impact on people. The second, spread by blood and body fluids, was more insidious. Patients could be silently infected for years before serious complications emerged. Researchers discovered hepatitis B in the 1960s, but it quickly became clear that it was not the only cause of the blood-borne infections. While studying hepatitis spread by blood transfusions, Alter found that some patients were being infected by an unknown agent. He later showed that blood from the patients could transmit the disease to chimpanzees. The next breakthrough came from Houghton and his colleagues. Through a new and untested strategy, they used human antibodies from patients to help identify the virus and sequenced the genetic code of what became hepatitis C. The final step in the effort came from Rice, then at Washington University in St Louis, who demonstrated that the virus alone could cause hepatitis, explaining the remaining infections spread by blood transfusions. The advent of sensitive tests for hepatitis C and antiviral drugs that can treat the infection soon followed.”