WOLF PRIZE RECIPIENTS IN MEDICINE

1978


GEORGE D. SNELL, Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, U.S.A., for discovery of H-2 antigens, which codes for major transplantation antigens and the onset of the immune response; JEAN DAUSSET, Saint-Louis Hospital, Paris, France, for discovering the HL-A system, the major histocompatibility complex in man and its primordial role in organ transplantation; and JON J. van ROOD, University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands, for his contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the HL-A system in man and its implications in transplantation and in disease.

1979


ROGER W. SPERRY, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, U.S.A., for his studies on the functional differentiation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain; ARVID CARLSSON, University of Goteborg, Goteborg, Sweden, for his work which established the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter; and OLEH HORNYKIEWICZ, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, for opening a new approach in the control of Parkinson's disease by L-Dopa.

1980


CESAR MILSTEIN, Medical Research Council, Cambridge, U.K.; LEO SACHS, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel; and Sir JAMES L. GOWANS, Medical Research Council, London, U.K.,for their contributions to knowledge of the function and disfunction of the body cells through their studies on the immunological role of the lymphocytes, the development of specific antibodies and the elucidation of mechanisms governing the control and differentiation of normal and cancer cells.

1981


BARBARA McCLINTOCK, Carnegie Institute of Washington, New York, U.S.A., for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure behaviour and function, and for her identification and description of transposable genetic (mobile) elements; and STANLEY N. COHEN, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, U.S.A., for his concepts underlying genetic engineering; for constructing a biologically functional hybrid plasmid, and for achieving actual expression of a foreign gene implanted in E. coli by the recombinant DNA method.

1982


JEAN-PIERRE CHANGEUX, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France, for the isolation, purification and characterization of the acetylcholine receptor; SOLOMON H. SNYDER, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A., for the development of the ways to label neurotransmitter receptors which provide tools to describe their properties; and Sir JAMES W. BLACK, Wellcome Research Laboratories, Beckenham, U.K., for developing agents which block beta adrenergic and histamine receptors.

1983/4


Not awarded.

1984/5


DONALD F. STEINER, University of Chicago Medical Center, Chicago, U.S.A., for his discoveries concerning the bio-synthesis and processing of insulin which have had profound implications for basic biology and clinical medicine.

1986


OSAMU HAYAISHI, Osaka Medical College, Osaka, Japan, for his discovery of the oxygenase enzymes and elucidation of their structure and biological importance.

1987


PEDRO CUATRECASAS, Glaxo Inc., Research Triangle Park, U.S.A., and MEIR WILCHEK, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, for the invention and development of affinity chromatography and its applications to biomedical sciences.

1988


HENRI-GERY HERS, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium, and ELIZABETH F. NEUFELD, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, U.S.A., for the biochemical elucidation of lysosomal storage diseases and the resulting contributions to biology, pathology, prenatal diagnosis and therapeutics.

1989


JOHN B. GURDON, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., for his introduction of the xenopus oocyte into molecular biology and his demonstration that the nucleus of a differentiated cell and of the egg differ in expression but not in the content of genetic material; and EDWARD B. LEWIS, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, U.S.A., for his demonstration and exploration of the genetic control of the development of body segments by homeotic genes.

1990


MACLYN McCARTY, The Rockefeller University, N.Y., U.S.A., for his part in the demostration that the transforming factor in bacteria is due to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the concomitant discovery that the genetic material is composed of DNA.

1991


SEYMOUR BENZER, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, U.S.A., for having generated a new field of molecular neurogenetics by his pioneering research on the dissection of the nervous system and behavior by gene mutations.

1992


M. JUDAH FOLKMAN, Harvard Medical School-Children's Hospital, Boston, U.S.A., for his discoveries which originated the concept and developed the field of angiogenesis research.

1993


Not awarded.

1994/5


MICHAEL J. BERRIDGE, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K.; and YASUTOMI NISHIZUKA, Kobe University School of Medicine, Kobe, Japan, for their discoveries concerning cellular transmembrane signalling involving phospholipids and calcium.

1995/6


STANLEY B. PRUSINER, University of California, School of Medicine, San Francisco, U.S.A., for discovering prions, a new class of pathogens that cause important neurodegenerative disease by inducing changes in protein structure.

1996/7


MARY FRANCES LYON, Medical Research Council, Mammalian Genetics Unit,Harwell, Didcot , United Kingdom, for her hypothesis concerning the random inactivation of X-chromosomes in mammals.

1998


MICHAEL SELA and RUTH ARNON, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, for their major discoveries in the field of immunology.

1999


ERIC R. KANDEL, Columbia University, New York, U.S.A., for the elucidation of the organismic, cellular and molecular mechanisms whereby short-term memory is converted to a long-term form.

2000


Not awarded.

2001


AVRAM HERSHKO, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel; and ALEXANDER VARSHAVSKY, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, for the discovery of the ubiquitin system of intracellular protein degradation and the crucial functions of this system in cellular regulation.

2002/3


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; and 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.

2004


ROBERT A. WEINBERG, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, for his discovery that cancer cells including human tumor cells, carry somatically mutated genes-oncogenes that operate to drive their malignant proliferation; and ROGER Y. TSIEN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction.

2005


ANTHONY R. HUNTER, The Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, USA, for the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation; ANTHONY J. PAWSON, The Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada, for his discovery of protein domains essential for mediating protein-protein interactions in cellular signaling pathways, and the insights this research has provided into cancer; ALEXANDER LEVITZKI, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, for pioneering signal transduction therapy and for developing tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer and a range of other diseases.


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