The members of the Prize Committee in Medicine recommend the award of the 1981 Wolf Prize jointly to:
Barbara McClintock
Carnegie Institute of Washington
Long Island, New York, USA
Stanley N. Cohen
Stanford University, School of Medicine
Stanford, California, USA
Dr. Barbara McClintock is recognized for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure, behavior and function. Her early work established many of the properties of chromosomes, including the cytological proof that genetic recombination involves a physical crossing over of homologous chromosomes. Her most brilliant contribution, however, has been her identification and description of transposable (mobile) genetic elements.
These are now known to exist in bacteria, lower eukaryotes, higher plants and animals.
They are, in all probability, ubiquitous. Thirty years ago, McClintock had already identified and described the basic behavior of transposable elements: that they can move from place to place in the genome, that they can disrupt expression of a gene by insertion in or near the gene, that gene expression can be restored fully or partially when the element is removed by transposition and that they are involved in the production of unidirectional deletions and a number of other types of chromosomal rearrangements. Recent studies have confirmed that the transposable elements of yeast and bacteria share all of these properties.
Although a number of workers have contributed to the concepts underlying genetic engineering based on recombinant DNA, Professor Stanley N. Cohen and his colleagues were the first to construct, in 1973, a biologically functional hybrid plasmid and in the following year to achieve actual expression of a foreign gene implanted in E. coli by the recombinant DNA method. Dr. Cohen has exercised a central and seminal role in discovering and developing this methodology, and in demonstrating its usefulness for analysing complex genetic elements, and for obtaining expression of foreign genes in bacterial cells.