Two British scientists are to share the 2002 Nobel prize for medicine. It is the second year in a row that the prize has been awarded for research which began at Cambridge.
Two British scientists are to share the 2002 Nobel prize for medicine. It is the second year in a row that the prize has been awarded for research which began at Cambridge.
Sydney Brenner, a Fellow of King's College who now works at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, US and Sir John Sulston, founder of the Sanger Institute at Cambridge and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, will share the award with US scientist Robert Horvitz. All three men began their Nobel-winning work on nematode worms at Cambridge's MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology.
They have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for their discovery of key genes which regulate organ development and programmed cell death. This research has shed new light on the development of many diseases, and prompted new research into the role of programmed cell death in a range of fatal diseases including AIDS and cancer.
Sydney Brenner became interested in cell differentiation and organ development in the early 1960s. Conscious that it would be difficult to uncover the fundamental mechanisms in highly complex mammals, Brenner decided to look at relatively simple nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent worm 1mm long. Dr Brenner's pioneering work was developed at Cambridge in the 1970s by his colleagues John Sulston and Robert Horvitz.
Responding to news of the award this week, Dr Brenner said:
"When I began this work almost 40 years ago in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, it was with the aim of creating a new experimental tool for studying more complex biological systems.
"The early successes of molecular biology were based on experiments with the relatively simple bacteria and their viruses. Multicellular animals, with complex cellular systems developing from a fertilized egg, posed new and challenging problems for us to solve. C. elegans was a careful and happy choice; it was small, containing about 1,000 cells, easy to grow in the laboratory with a rapid life cycle and a mode of reproduction that facilitated genetic experiments.
"The discovery by J. Sulston of a fixed programme of cell death in the developmental lineages and the analysis of the genes controlling this process by R. Horvitz revealed the functions underlying this important biological process. There are many other discoveries made with this model organism which, like cell death, have wide and general implications for human biology and medicine, but, equally, there are still many problems to solve.
"I am very proud of my work on C. elegans and gratified to have seen what has come from it. I want to thank the Medical Research Council of Great Britain for providing all the support and for their patience and faith in the project. I thank all my colleagues for their help and, above all, I offer my thanks for Nature's gift of C. elegans."
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