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| A portrait of scientist James E. Rothman, of the United States, and illustrations of his work are displayed on a screen during a news conference to announce the laureates of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 7, 2013. Americans Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Sudhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries on how proteins and other materials are transported within cells. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Two Americans and a German-American won the Nobel Prize in medicine
Monday for illuminating how tiny bubbles inside cells shuttle key
substances around like a vast and highly efficient fleet of vans,
delivering the right cargo to the right place at the right time.
Scientists believe the research could someday lead to new medicines for epilepsy, diabetes and other conditions.
The
work has already helped doctors diagnose a severe form of epilepsy and
immune deficiency diseases in children. It has also aided research into
the brain and many neurological diseases, and opened the door for
biotech companies to make yeast pump out large quantities of useful
proteins like insulin.
The $1.2 million prize
will be shared by James Rothman, 62, of Yale University, Randy Schekman,
64, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Thomas Sudhof,
57, of Stanford University.
They unlocked the
mysteries of the cell's internal transport system, which relies on
bubble-like structures called vesicles to deliver substances the cell
needs. The fleet of vesicles is sort of the FedEx of the cellular world.
When
a pancreas cell releases insulin or one brain cell sends out a chemical
messenger to talk to a neighboring one, for example, the vesicles have
to deliver those substances to the right places on the cell surface.
They also ferry cargo between different parts of a cell.
"Imagine
hundreds of thousands of people who are traveling around hundreds of
miles of streets; how are they going to find the right way? Where will
the bus stop and open its doors so that people can get out?" Nobel
committee secretary Goran Hansson said. "There are similar problems in
the cell."
Jeremy Berg, former director of the
National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Md., said
the prize was long overdue and widely expected because the work was "so
fundamental and has driven so much other research."
Berg,
who now directs the Institute for Personalized Medicine at the
University of Pittsburgh, said the work provided the intellectual
framework that scientists use to study how brain cells communicate and
how other cells release hormones.
So the work has indirectly affected research into virtually all neurological disease as well as other diseases, he said.
In
the 1970s, Schekman discovered a set of genes that were required for
vesicle transport. Rothman revealed in the 1980s and '90s how vesicles
delivered their cargo to the right places. Also in the '90s, Sudhof
identified the machinery that controls when vesicles release chemical
messengers from one brain cell that let it communicate with another.
"This is not an overnight thing. Most of it has been accomplished and developed over many years, if not decades," Rothman said.
Rothman
said he lost grant money for the work recognized by the Nobel
committee, but he will now reapply, hoping the prize will make a
difference in receiving funding.
Schekman said
he was awakened at 1 a.m. at his home in California by the chairman of
the prize committee, just as he was suffering from jetlag after
returning from a trip to Germany the night before.
"I
wasn't thinking too straight. I didn't have anything elegant to say,"
he told The Associated Press. "All I could say was `Oh, my God,' and
that was that."
He called the prize a
wonderful acknowledgment of the work he and his students had done. "I
called my lab manager and I told him to go buy a couple bottles of
Champagne and expect to have a celebration with my lab," he said.
Sudhof,
who was born in Germany but moved to the U.S. in 1983 and also has
American citizenship, told the AP he received the call from the
committee while driving in Spain, where he was due to give a talk.
"And
like a good citizen I pulled over and picked up the phone," he said.
"To be honest, I thought at first it was a joke. I have a lot of friends
who might play these kinds of tricks."
"I was stunned and I was literally speechless," Sudhof later told reporters.
The
medicine prize kicked off this year's Nobel announcements. The awards
in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced
this week and next. Each prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.2
million).
Rothman and Schekman won the Albert
Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for their research in 2002 - an
award often seen as a precursor of a Nobel Prize. Sudhof won a Lasker
last month.
Established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prizes have been handed out since 1901.
Last
year's Nobel in medicine went to Britain's John Gurdon and Japan's
Shinya Yamanaka for their contributions to stem cell science.
