A British physician and pharmacologist who led the development of artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), the most important advance against malaria in decades. He died on February 1st 2026, aged 74.
White was a star student at Guy's Hospital in London. When he was nine his family moved to Singapore. Family trips to the Malaysian jungle fostered a love of botany—he had a habit of lying down to examine intriguing flowers—but he was set on medicine. At 23, as a junior doctor, he volunteered in Nepal, reaching villages that were days from any road, where he found he was expected to serve as the dentist too. The experience left him appalled by the state of health care in remote places and outraged at the careless practices of the WHO and USAID.
White was an early member of the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit (MORU), set up to study tropical diseases at Mahidol University in Bangkok. In 1981 he raced to China to obtain artemisinin after learning of Tu Youyou's extraction of the compound from sweet wormwood. The health-care establishment reacted with scorn, implicitly distrusting herbal medicine.
He conducted trials in the 1990s in Vietnam and the Gambia, and did what he considered his most useful work among Karen refugees in the Shoklo camp on the Thailand–Myanmar border, where his clinic was a wooden hut among leaf-roofed bamboo shacks accessible only by foot or 4x4.
Artemisinin's efficacy faded so fast when used alone that patients needed seven days of treatment. White realised it had to be paired with a longer-lasting drug. The resulting artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), taken as pills, cured 98% of non-severe cases with few side-effects. In 2006 the WHO recommended ACT as first-line treatment for non-severe malaria. White also found that, in severe cases, injection of the derivative artesunate reduced mortality in adults by 34.7% compared with injected quinine—but it took the WHO four more years to endorse this finding.
Between 2000 and 2015, deaths from malaria fell by more than a third. But by 2009 the parasite had begun to develop resistance. White's response was to add a third drug to make a triple combination, and he advocated mass-screening, identification of hotspots, malaria posts in every village and mass-administration of drugs.
He published some 1,300 scientific papers. By 2021 there was a malaria vaccine, which he thought "OK—not very good, not very bad", but, like bednets, not sufficient on its own.
White was once vice-captain of the Thailand national cricket side. In the Bangkok British Club team he served as Fines Master, gleefully recording ducks and dropped catches—and fining himself each year for failing to eradicate malaria from the world. He played harmonica in the clubs of Bangkok and drew cartoons for his colleagues. He retired to a cottage in Oxford filled with rescued fledgling birds.
I've known him as a man, as an adolescent and as a child -- sometimes on the same day.