Post date: Oct 07, 2013 7:58:44 PM
Three U.S.-based scientists win the 2013 Nobel medicine prize for work on how hormones and enzymes are transported within and outside cells.
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (OCTOBER 7, 2013) (REUTERS) - Three U.S.-based scientists won the 2013 Nobel medicine prize on Monday (October 7) for their work on how hormones and enzymes are transported within and outside cells, giving insight into diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer's.
Americans James Rothman, 62, Randy Schekman, 64, and German-born Thomas Suedhof, 57, separately mapped out one of the body's critical networks that uses tiny bubbles known as vesicles to ferry chemicals such as insulin within cells.The system, which also describes how vesicles transport molecules to the cell surface for secretion, is so critical and sensitive that errors and disruption in the mechanism can lead to serious illness or death.
Diabetes and some brain disorders have been attributed at least in part to defects in the vesicle transport systems.
Rothman is professor at Yale University, Schekman is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Suedhof is a professor at Stanford University. The three, working separately, adopted quite different approaches to the problem, reflecting their own scientific specialisms.
"When it happened this morning, having lived through the moment that it could happen, you have all these thoughts about clever things that you're going to say and all I could say because I was so shaken was, 'Oh my god, oh my god,' and then I went speechless, I couldn't say anything more," said Schekman at a news conference, describing how he awoke to the good news in the early hours of his morning.
Medicine is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
Schekman, a geneticist, first became interested in how proteins move within cells in 1974. At the University of California, Berkeley, he began working on yeast, a single cell microorganism. Research showed his findings applied equally to human cells.
"As a result, making that connection, it became really pretty obvious to the emerging biotechnology industry that one could use yeast and the pyro of fermentation, a very large scale fermentation to make commercial quantities of these otherwise very precious protein molecules," said Schekman at the news conference.
Among Schekman's research aims is to study whether the accumulation of the protein amyloid in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients is due to disruption of the vesicle system.