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Winners Named for Nobel Prize for Medicine

By: Derek // News Briefs, World News

Nobel Prize committee officials released their choice(s) for winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday. James Rothman, 62, of Yale University, Randy Schekman, 64, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Thomas Sudhof, 57, of Stanford University, will share the $1.2 million prize for their research on cell transportation.

The scientists’ work focused on how the traffic control system inside the human body gets critical substances delivered to the right place at the right time. A failure in the process leads to such defects as diabetes and other immune system disorders.

Nobel committee secretary Goran Hansson described it thusly: “Imagine hundreds of thousands of people who are traveling around hundreds of miles of streets; how are they going to find the right way? Where will the bus stop and open its doors so that people can get out? There are similar problems in the cell.”

Though the prize is issued for this calendar year, recognition is the culmination of decades of research by the winners’, going all the way back to the 1970s, when Schekman discovered a particular set of genes that are required for vesicle transport. Contributions by Rothman in the 1980s and 1990s, and Sudhof in the 1990s, also laid the groundwork for increased understanding of the topic. (Derek Dowell – VNN) (Image: Flickr | Solis Invicti)