The Prize Committee for Medicine has unanimously decided that the 2002/3 Wolf Prize be jointly awarded to:
Ralph L. Brinster
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
for the development of procedures to manipulate mouse ova and embryos, which has enabled transgenesis and its applications in mice.
Mario R. Capecchi
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Oliver Smithies
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
for their contribution to the development of gene-targeting, enabling elucidation of gene function in mice.
Ralph L. Brinster has made seminal advances that have enabled the development of the field of transgenesis. He developed the egg culture system, essential for the generation of transgenic animals. He first showed that it was possible to colonize a mouse blastocyst with stem cells from older embryos. Moreover, he showed that teratocarcinoma cells could combine with blastocyst cells to form adult chimeric mice, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach to change the genetic character of mice. Brinster was also the first scientist to microinject fertilized eggs (with RNA) and was at the forefront of the field in applying these microinjection methods to generate transgenic mice.
Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies developed the use of homologous recombination for the targeted mutation of chosen genes in mammalian cells. Subsequent to spending years developing the approach, these two scientists independently demonstrated that that their methods could be used to introduce mutations into multi-potential mouse embryonic stem cells. The technology they invented offers a means for creating strains of mice with mutations in virtually any gene. Such mutant mouse models have since been generated by countless groups worldwide, with the aim of studying gene functions in vivo and making animal models of human diseases, ranging from immunological, neurological, and cardiovascular diseases, to cancer.