Listen to the original podcast on the Insight Myanmar website
Professor Francois Nosten, Director of MORU's Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU), reflects on the decades he’s spent on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, a place of relentless upheaval and quiet endurance. From the 1980s onward, he has lived amid war, displacement, and disease, building a fragile bridge between science and survival. He characterizes the border as a wound that never quite closes – people cross not for opportunity but to escape a state that devours its own. What he describes is not steady progress but a cycle of collapse and recovery, every advance shadowed by the return of violence and the onset of disease.