Professor Alicja Chybicka MD

Professor Alicja Chybicka MD (head of the Department and Clinic of Paediatric Bone Marrow Transplantation, Oncology and Haematology at Wrocław Medical University in Wrocław): “I have been involved in science for 32 years. In my specific field, research success is tantamount to saving human life. I and my team have such success to our credit. Our success story entails saving the life of a child. That of a teen-age boy who was in the fourth stage of cancer, had gone through two transplants and was under palliative care. We saved his life after applying gene therapy. That scientific achievement of ours won an award at an international oncology congress. I felt proud as a Pole. With that achievement, we have outdistanced countries much better equipped financially for scientific research.

”Professor Andrzej Wiszniewski,
former Minister of Science and Chairman
of the Scientific Research Committee:
“I am proud and most happy to be able to attend this presentation of the Honorary Pearl awards for science, and that for three reasons. For one, because I myself have been involved in science for 50 years. Secondly, because I have been living for 60 years in Poland’s most beautiful city – in Wrocław – which is the same place where to-day’s laureate, Professor Alicja Chybicka, is working. And thirdly – the greatest cause of my joy is not just the fact that the Pearl goes to a brilliant scientist but that it is presented to a person who has devoted all her scientific work to help those most disadvantaged, I mean children suffering from a disease regarded as incurable. Yet professor Chybicka and her team managed to cure many of these children. Had all the children she has saved over the years come here to this room to-night, there would certainly be not enough places to sit them. This Pearl goes to a person who deserves it full!”