Cell researchers win Nobel medicine prize
Print Edition
Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Sudhof yesterday won the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries on how hormones, enzymes and other key substances are transported within cells.
This traffic control system keeps activities inside cells from descending into chaos and has helped researchers gain a better understanding of a range of diseases including diabetes and disorders affecting the immune system, the committee said.
The discoveries have helped doctors diagnose a severe form of epilepsy and immune deficiency diseases in children, Nobel committee secretary Goran Hansson said. In the future, scientists hope the research could lead to medicines against more common types of epilepsy, diabetes and other metabolism deficiencies, he said.
Rothman, 62, is a professor at Yale University while Schekman, 64, is at the University of California, Berkeley. Suedhof, 57, joined Stanford University in 2008. Schekman said he was woken at 1am at his home in California by the chairman of the prize committee and was still suffering from jetlag after returning from a trip to Germany the night before.
“I wasn’t thinking too straight. I didn’t have anything elegant to say,” he said. “All I could say was ‘Oh my God,’ and that was that.”
He called the prize a wonderful acknowledgment of the work he and his students had done and said he knew it would change his life.
“I called my lab manager and I told him to go buy a couple bottles of champagne and expect to have a celebration with my lab,” he said.
The Nobel committee said the three researchers work on “vesicle traffic” — the transport system of our cells — helped scientists understand how “cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time” inside cells. Vesicles are tiny bubbles that act as cargo carriers.
“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?” said Hansson, the committee’s secretary. “There are similar problems in the cell, to find the right way between the different organelles and out to the surface of the cell.”
The medicine prize kicked off this year’s Nobel announcements. The awards in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced this week and next. Each prize is worth US$1.2 million.
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