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Donald Hopkins, M.D., who has devoted his career to eradicating preventable disease, was among 24 people honored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in June.

Dr. Hopkins, senior health consultant to The Carter Center's Global 2000 program, received a five-year MacArthur Fellowship grant of $320,000 in recognition of his work to eradicate Guinea Worm disease (dracunculiasis).

A distinguished career in public health made Dr. Hopkins a logical recipient of the grant. Before joining the Center in 1987, he was deputy director with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he worked to eliminate smallpox, the first and only disease ever eradicated by medical science.

"Dr. Hopkins is a model international civil servant. He is highly motivated, concerned, competent, skilled in negotiating, and tenacious in pursuit of better health," said Health Policy Fellow William Foege, M.D., who worked on smallpox with Dr. Hopkins at the CDC. "The Carter Center is fortunate to have him, as is the world."

"I've been interested in tropical medicine since I saw so many people affected by trachoma (an infection of the eye) in Egypt while visiting there as an undergraduate student in 1961," Dr. Hopkins said. "I decided then and there that I wanted to work on tropical diseases."

Dr. Hopkins now focuses his efforts on the eradication of another devastating disease. If all goes as planned, Guinea worm, a debilitating parasitic infection that once afflicted hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, will be eradicated soon after the December 1995 target date. Dr. Hopkins has played a major role in that process, using the same surveillance and containment strategy that proved successful in eradicating smallpox.

The MacArthur grant is among other prestigious honors he has received. In 1991, he was named an Outstanding African American by the National Research Council and its parent organizations -- the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Today, his portrait hangs in the Institute of Medicine with those of previous awardees, such as George Washington Carver, Mitchell W. Spellman, and William E.B. DuBois.

Dr. Hopkins has been a member of seven U.S. delegations to the World Health Assembly. His book, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (University of Chicago Press, 1983), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

But none of these awards and honors sit on Dr. Hopkins' desk, only a Guinea worm he calls "Henrietta," preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. Soon she will be the last of her kind.

"By the end of 1995, it appears that Guinea worm will have been reduced about 95 percent or more since 3.5 million cases were estimated to have occurred in 1986," Dr. Hopkins said. "Final eradication should be completed within one or two years after that. To help make that happen will be quite an honor."