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3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine 3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine
(35 minutes later)
Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Suedhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries on how proteins and other materials are transported within cells. Three cell biologists at American universities won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their work on how cells transport molecules, a system that involves small packages called vesicles that get the molecules where they need to go. The scientists, James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof, “have discovered the molecular principles that govern how this cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time in the cell,” according to a news release from the Nobel Foundation.
The Nobel committee said their research on “vesicle traffic” — the transport system of our cells — helped scientists understand how “cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time” inside cells. Dr. Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, identified the genes that regulate cells’ transportation system, originally studying yeast cells with faulty systems, where vesicles piled up in places they were not supposed to be.
“Disturbances in this system have deleterious effects and contribute to conditions such as neurological diseases, diabetes and immunological disorders,” the committee said. Dr. Rothman, a Yale professor who is currently chairman of the department of cell biology there, discovered a protein complex that allows vesicles to dock and fuse with the membranes they are targeting.
Rothman is a professor at Yale University while Schekman is at the University of California, Berkeley. Suedhof joined Stanford University in 2008. Dr. Südhof, who is originally from Germany, is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work on how nerve cells communicate with one another in the brain built on the machinery discovered by Drs. Schekman and Rothman by pinpointing how vesicles know exactly when to release their molecular contents.
The medicine prize kicked off this year’s Nobel announcements. The awards in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced by other prize juries this week and next. Each prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million). Together, the work of the three newest Nobel Laureates has unlocked a “fundamental process in cell physiology,” as the Nobel committee put it, one that enhances scientists’ understanding and research of diseases like diabetes in which the cell transportation system goes awry.
“Vesicle transport and fusion operate, with the same general principles, in organisms as different as yeast and man,” the Nobel Foundation said in its announcement. “Without this wonderfully precise organization, the cell would lapse into chaos.”