An American and two Britons won this year's Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday 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 and strokes.
Britons Sydney Brenner, 75, and John Sulston, 60, and American H. Robert Horvitz, 55, shared the prize, worth about US$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 La Jolla, California, 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, 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.
Information about programmed cell death has helped scientists understand how some viruses and bacteria invade human cells, the 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.
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