Gene Experts Win Nobel for Medicine

[Max]

Gene Experts Win Nobel for Medicine
Mon Oct 7,12:53 PM ET
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - An American and two Britons won this year's Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discoveries about how genes regulate organ growth and a process of programmed cell suicide. Their findings shed light on the development of many illnesses, including AIDS ( news - web sites) and strokes.


AP Photo


Reuters
Slideshow: Nobel Prizes Awarded




Britons Sydney Brenner, 75, and John E. Sulston, 60, and American H. Robert Horvitz, 55, shared the prize, worth about $1 million.

Working with tiny worms, the laureates identified key genes regulating organ development and programmed cell death, a necessary process for pruning excess cells. Many cancer treatment strategies are now aimed at stimulating the cell-death process to kill cancerous cells.

Brenner, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, Calif., is also the founder of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. He showed that the tiny transparent worm C. elegans was useful for studying how cells specialize and organs develop. His work "laid the foundation for this year's prize," the awards committee said.

Brenner also demonstrated that a chemical could produce specific genetic mutations in the worm, allowing different mutations to be linked to specific effects on organ development.

Sulston, of the Sanger Center at England's Cambridge University, discovered that certain cells in the developing worm are destined to die through programmed cell death. He described visible steps in the cell-death process and demonstrated the first mutations of genes that participate in that process, the committee said.

Horvitz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( news - web sites), identified the first two "death genes" in the worms and showed that humans have a gene similar to one of them, the awards committee said. Scientists now know that most genes controlling cell death in the worms have counterparts in humans.

Sulston, reached in Cambridge, said he was "surprised and delighted" at winning the prize and emphasized the importance of the work by Brenner and Horvitz. All three had worked together in Cambridge in the 1970s.

"Something we do need to keep in mind all the time is how much can come out of work that's done to try to understand, in the broadest sense, and sharing that understanding with everybody else," he said.

Horvitz was notified by the Nobel committee while vacationing in the French Alps.

"It was quite enjoyable to have champagne before lunch in France," Horvitz said in a telephone call to a news conference at MIT on Monday.

"I would find nothing more gratifying than to learn that one or more of my discoveries led specifically to pharmaceutical treatments and cures for human diseases," he said.

"That's a dream. At this point, I think that dream is still tenable."

Information about programmed cell death has helped scientists understand how some viruses and bacteria invade human cells, the Nobel committee said. In conditions such as AIDS, stroke and heart attack, cells are lost because of excessive cell death. In other diseases like cancer, cell death is reduced, leading to the survival of cells that are normally destined to die.

The award for medicine opened a week of Nobel Prizes that culminates Friday with the prestigious peace prize, the only one revealed in Oslo, Norway.

The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry and economics awards Wednesday in the Swedish capital.

As in years past, the date for the literature prize has not been set. But it always falls on a Thursday, usually the same week as the other awards.

The award committees make their decisions in deep secrecy and candidates are not publicly revealed for 50 years.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, left only vague guidelines in his will establishing the prizes, first awarded in 1901.

For the prize Monday, he simply stated the winner "shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine."

The 18 lifetime members of the Swedish Academy who choose the literature laureate make their final decision at one of their weekly meetings, only setting the date early in the same week to keep the world guessing.

Kaj Schueler, a literary editor at Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, predicted the academy's choice would be a surprise since last year's award went to perennial favorite V.S. Naipaul.

"I also think it's time for them to pick a poet," Schueler said, declining to single out any names. "The last poet they had was the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. since they they've had playwrights and prose writers."

The only public hints are for the peace prize.

The five-member awards committee never reveals the candidates, but sometimes those making the nominations announce their choices.

With the world still reeling from last year's Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and concerned about U.S. plans for a war in Iraq, no clear favorites have emerged.

Among the nominees were Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has sought to unify his country after the hard-line Taliban was ousted by U.S.-led airstrikes, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ( news - web sites), the Salvation Army and the U.S. Peace Corps.

President Bush ( news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair ( news - web sites) were nominated for leading the war against terrorism but were seen as unlikely winners in wake of their efforts to convince the world of the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites).

The Nobel Assembly at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute, which selects the medicine prize winner, invites nominations from previous recipients, professors of medicine and other professionals worldwide before whittling down its choices in the fall.

Last year's winners were Leland H. Hartwell of the United States and R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M. Nurse from Britain for discovering key regulators of the process that lets cells divide, which is expected to lead to new cancer treatments.

The awards always are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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On the Net:

Nobel Foundation site, http://www.nobel.se

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...nobel_medicine

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"Events in our past seem to slip further away with time. But what happens when they circle back and meet us head on....in the present? Before we allow ourselves to be consumed by our regrets, we should remember the mistakes we make in life are not so important as the lessons we draw from them.." Outer Limits(Last supper)

[Max]

Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine
Mon Oct 7, 8:10 AM ET
By The Associated Press

Recent winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, and their research, according to the Nobel Foundation:



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2002: Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, Britain; H. Robert Horvitz, United States; for discoveries concerning how genes regulate organ development and a process of programmed cell death.

2001: Leland H. Hartwell, United States; R. Timothy (Tim) Hunt and Sir Paul M. Nurse, Britain; for discovering key regulators of the process that lets cells divide, which is expected to lead to new cancer treatments.

2000: Arvid Carlsson, Sweden; Paul Greengard and Eric R. Kandel, United States; for research on how brain cells transmit signals to each other, thus increasing understanding on how the brain functions and how neurological and psychiatric disorders may be better treated.

1999: Guenter Blobel, United States, for protein research that shed new light on diseases, including cystic fibrosis and early development of kidney stones.

1998: Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro and Ferid Murad of the United States, for discovery of properties of nitric oxide, a common air pollutant but also a lifesaver because of its capacity to dilate blood vessels.

1997: Stanley B. Prusiner, United States, discovery of prions, an infectious agent at the heart of several forms of brain-wasting disease.

1996: Peter C. Doherty, Australia, and Rolf M. Zinkernagel, Switzerland, discovery of how the immune system recognizes infected cells.

1995: Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus, United States; and Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard, Germany; discoveries related to how genes control human development in the womb.

1994: Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell, United States, discovery of G-proteins and how cells confuse messages and foster diseases.

1993: Richard J. Roberts, Britain, and Phillip A. Sharp, United States, discovery of "split genes" that changed how scientists look at evolution and advanced research on hereditary diseases, including some cancers.

1992: Edwin G. Krebs, United States, Edmond H. Fischer, United States and Switzerland, discoveries concerning the process of "reversible protein phosphorylation" that help explain how imbalances in cells cause diseases.

1991: Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann, Germany, discoveries concerning single ion channels in cells that shed light on mechanisms underlying several diseases, including diabetes and cystic fibrosis.

1990: Joseph E. Murray and E. Donnall Thomas, United States, discoveries about organ and cell transplantation in treatment of human disease.

1989: J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus, United States, discovery of a family of genes that helped scientists understand how cancer develops.

1988: Sir James W. Black, Britain, research that led to beta-blocker drug for heart disease and drug for peptic ulcers; and Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings, United States, research leading to drugs for AIDS ( news - web sites), herpes, leukemia and malaria.

1987: Susumu Tonegawa, Japan, for discovering how the body is able to produce thousands of different antibodies to fight disease.

1986: Stanley Cohen, United States, and Rita Levi-Montalcini, Italy and United States, discoveries of mechanisms that regulate growth of cells and organs.

1985: Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein, United States, discoveries involving cholesterol and cholesterol-related diseases.

1984: Niels K. Jerne, Denmark and Georges J.F. Koehler, Germany, and Cesar Milstein, Britain and Argentina, studies in immunology.

1983: Barbara McClintock, United States, research in genetics.

1982: John R. Vane, Britain, and Sune K. Bergstrom and Bengt I. Samuelsson, Sweden, discoveries involving glandular hormones.

1981: David H. Hubel, United States, and Torsten N. Wiesel, Sweden, discovery that sight stimulation in infancy was tied to future vision; and Roger W. Sperry, United States, demonstration of a kind of division of labor in brain.

1980: George D. Snell and Baruj Benacerraf, United States, and Jean Dausset, France, work on genetically determined structures on cell surfaces that regulate immunological reactions.

1979: Allan M. Cormack, United States, and Godfrey N. Hounsfield, Britain, development of computer-assisted tomography X-ray technique.

1978: Daniel Nathans and Hamilton O. Smith, United States, and Werner Arber, Switzerland, discovery of a method for breaking apart genetic material.

1977: Rosalyn Yalow, Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin, United States, new techniques for treating the endocrine system and controlling the chemistry of human emotions and disorders.

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"Events in our past seem to slip further away with time. But what happens when they circle back and meet us head on....in the present? Before we allow ourselves to be consumed by our regrets, we should remember the mistakes we make in life are not so important as the lessons we draw from them.." Outer Limits(Last supper)

[Max]

Nobel prize for British and US scientists who used worms to decode the book of life

James Meek, science correspondent
Tuesday October 8, 2002
The Guardian

The discovery of the myriad little deaths which lead to life brought the most coveted prize in world medicine to two Britons and an American yesterday.
Sir John Sulston, Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz were awarded the Nobel prize for medicine for decades of collective work studying the genesis and growth of microscopic beasts called nematode worms.

Their research showed that the growth and, equally important, the programmed death of the hundreds of cells in the developing worm was a key to understanding the same processes in the multi-trillion celled human body.

The award to Sir John, now 60, is bound to be seen as at least a nod towards his leading role in decoding the "book of life", the human genome, the work for which he is better known to the public.

There is no mention of this in the citation, however, and he was only one of a number of scientists who led the publicly funded human genome project. The award of science Nobel prizes tends to lag decades behind the discoveries for which they are awarded.

Nonetheless, Sir John yesterday linked the "sharing" spirit of the worm work to that of the public genome project, both freely accessible to all scientists, unlike the rival, commercial genome project.

"It's tremendously exciting for me," he said. "The worm worked so well because the community held an ethos of sharing - just as the public genome projects have - from the beginning. We gave all our results to others as soon as we had them. From sharing, discovery is accelerated in the community. Research is hastened when people share results freely."

Apart from immense prestige, the three scientists share a prize of 10m Swedish krona, about £700,000.

Sydney Brenner, 75, was born in South Africa and is now based at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, but is a British citizen who spent most of his working life at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. Sir John and Mr Horvitz both worked under him for part of their careers.

In 1974 he showed how the growth of life from a single cell to a whole creature could be tracked by watching the effects of genetic mutations in the transparent, millimetre-long nematode.

Sir John, who is based at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, built on Mr Brenner's work to reveal how every worm grows in the same way, its cells unfolding and dying in a predetermined genetic sequence, like clockwork.

Ten years later Robert Horvitz, 55, whose lab is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, identified the first so-called "death genes", necessary to prompt unneeded cells to commit suicide.

As a result, we now know that the cell death mechanism is astonishingly similar in the primitive worms and human beings, making the creatures an ideal tool to understand human development and disease. There are hopes that one day it will be routine to send a targeted chemical command to cancer cells, ordering them to kill themselves.

The prizewinners, who will receive their awards in December, are picked by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, on the basis of mainly secret nominations by previous laureates and leading scientists around the world.

This is the second year running that the medicine prize has gone to two Britons and an American. Timothy Hunt and Paul Nurse won with Leland Hartwell of the US last year.

Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society, said yesterday that Mr Brenner was being recognised for a "lifetime of outstanding contributions to science... It has long been recognised within the scientific community that Sydney Brenner's work has had an extraordinarily profound impact."

He added: "John Sulston, one of Sydney Brenner's many proteges, has demonstrated world-class leadership, not just in his science but also as head of the UK's contribution to the human genome project. He is a great role model for future generations of researchers, and has demonstrated great foresight in tackling the ethical, as well as scientific, consequences of one of the greatest scientific endeavours of all time."

Other Nobel prizes will be announced this week - physics today, chemistry and economics on Wednesday, literature probably on Thursday, and peace on Friday.

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"Events in our past seem to slip further away with time. But what happens when they circle back and meet us head on....in the present? Before we allow ourselves to be consumed by our regrets, we should remember the mistakes we make in life are not so important as the lessons we draw from them.." Outer Limits(Last supper)