Monthly Archives: July 2013

Norman Shumway obtained his MD from Vanderbilt Medical School in 1949 and went to the University of Minnesota for training in 1954. Open heart surgery was in its infancy when he came to Minnesota. Within a few years, the very first successful operation inside the human heart was performed there by his mentors. The heart-lung machine was not yet sufficiently developed and the Minnesota surgeons used total body hypothermia and subsequently cross-circulation to repair vascular defects in children. Having assisted in these early operations, Shumway decided to join the young field of Cardiothoracic Surgery. He left Minnesota after nine years of residency, fellowship, and a PhD. Degree to join the Department of Surgery at Stanford University where he continued his research leading to the first heart transplantation in the United States that he performed in 1968.

Professor Shumway made remarkable achievements in the field of Cardiothoracic Surgery. He led Stanford’s program in heart and, subsequently heart-lung, transplantation, to unequaled success. Currently, more than 50,000 patients have undergone heart transplants with a five-year survival expectancy. One of his other lasting legacies was the training program in Cardiothoracic Surgery that he established at Stanford University. After his retirement in 1993, he was appointed the Frances and Charles D. Field Emeritus Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford University. Professor Norman Shumway authored and co-authored more than 500 articles and book chapters. He also co-edited the book, Thoracic Transplantation, jointly with his daughter Sara.

Professor Shumway was awarded numerous honorary degrees from academic institutions worldwide, as well as scientific achievement awards from the American College of Surgeons, the American Association for Thoracic surgery and the American Surgical Association, among many others. He was also awarded t Rene Leriche Prize from the International Surgical Society in 1971, Lister Medal from the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1994, Medawar Prize from the Transplantation Society in 1992, the first Texas Heart Institute Medal in Cardiovascular Disease in 1972, and the Vanderbilt University Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1983. He was the President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, as well as Honorary Lifetime President of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of England, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ireland.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Roy Calne received his M.B.B.S. from Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London in 1953. He practiced at Guy’s Hospital for one year after graduation, then served in the Royal Army Medical Corps for two years, and as an orthopedic surgeon in Oxford for another two years. Following a tenure at Harvard Medical School, he became a lecturer at St. Mary and Westminster hospitals in London. In 1965, he was appointed a Professor of Surgery at Cambridge University, where he started the University’s kidney transplant program, which had since performed an enormous number of operations. Sir Roy was also the Vice-President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He is currently Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University, Fellow of Trinity Hall in Cambridge and Yeoh Ghim Professor of Surgery at the National University of Singapore.

Professor Sir Roy Calne was a key figure in establishing life-saving transplantation as part of routine practice through his work on drugs to suppress organ rejection. He started working on organ transplantation in 1959 at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, where he described the first effective immunosuppression for kidney transplantation using 6-mercaptopurine. In 1962, he was the first to use a derivative of 6-mercaptopurine in human patients, a treatment later adopted as standard. He also pioneered the use of cyclosporin A in 1978, which was so successful in preventing rejection that transplantation of hearts, livers and lungs became common. In 1968, he started the first European liver transplant program. He is also credited with the first pancreas and intestinal transplants in the United Kingdom, in 1992 and 1994, respectively, as well as the first successful heart-lung transplantation and combined pancreas, liver, intestines, stomach and kidney transplantation in the world in 1992. He is one of the world’s foremost specialists in pediatric liver transplantation.

Professor Sir Roy Calne published more than 18 books and hundreds of articles and lectured at some of the world’s most prestigious medical schools. He received numerous other prizes, medals, honorary degrees and international invited lectureships. Sir Roy became an elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, and was knighted in 1986. The British Transplantation Society conferred the “Sir Roy Calne Award” in his honor in 1995. A bronze bust of Sir Roy holding a human liver is placed outside the operating theaters of Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge. Aside from being one of the world’s champions of organ transplantation surgery, Sir Roy Calne is also a gifted oil painter and is a member of the Art Group 90.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Thomas Starzel earned his bachelor’s degree in Biology from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 1947, then obtained his M.A. in anatomy from Northwestern University in 1950 and earned both a Ph.D. in neurophysiology and an M.D. in 1952. He served as a researcher at the University of Colorado, then moved – since 1981 – to the University of Pittsburgh, where he started working on organ transplantation which was still an underdeveloped field.

Professor Starzl’s accomplishments as an organ transplant surgeon have profoundly impacted the medical community. Often referred to as “the father of modern organ transplantation,” Starzel developed many surgical techniques that were initially only known to him. Professor Starzl performed the world’s first liver transplant in 1963 and the first successful liver transplant in 1967, both while at the University of Colorado. He also performed the first simultaneous heart and liver transplant at Pittsburgh. He established the clinical utility of immunosuppressive drugs and determined the causative association between immunosuppression and post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease and other opportunistic infections, and provided the rationale for treatment by reversing the immunosuppressed state. Starzl is also credited for delineating the indications and limitations of abdominal organ transplantation and for advancing the techniques used for organ preservation, procurement and transportation.

Professor Starzel authored and co-authored numerous scientific articles, four books and 292 book chapters. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, he was one of the most prolific scientists in the world, and the most cited scientist in the field of clinical medicine.

Starzl’s accomplishments were recognized by numerous awards and honors including David M. Hume Memorial Award by the National Kidney Foundation in 1978; Brookdale Award by the American Medical Association in 1974; Bigelow Medal by Boston Surgical Society in 1989; City of Medicine Award in 1989; Distinguished Service Award by the American Liver Foundation in 1991; William Beaumont Prize by the American Gastroenterological Association in 1991; Peter Medawar Prize by the Transplantation Society in 1992; Jacobson Innovation Award of the American College of Surgeons in 1995; and Lannelongue International Medal by the Académie Nationale de Chirurgie in 1998. Starzl was also awarded honorary degrees from 21 universities in the United States and abroad and was named one of the most important people of the Millennium. In 1992, he was included as one of only five American members into the National French Academy of Medicine. He retired from clinical and surgical service in 1991 but remains active as a researcher and Professor of Surgery at the Pittsburgh Medical School and Medical Center’s Program, which is also named after him “The Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute.”

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Ulrich Sigwart received his medical education in Freiberg, Germany, and in Basel, Switzerland, and completed his residency at Farmington Union Hospital in Boston in 1972, and a fellowship in cardiology at Baylor Medical College in Houston in 1972. He returned to Europe in 1972 for further training at the University Hospital in Zurich and obtained habilitation from Düsseldorf, Germany. He served in different hospitals in the United States and Britain and was Director of the Department of Invasive Cardiology at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London for 12 years before moving to the University of Geneva in 2001, where he became Professor and Chief of the Cardiology Center in the Department of Internal Medicine. He is currently Chair of Cardiology at the University of Geneva, a recognized teacher at the Imperial College of Medicine in London and Professor of Medicine at the University of Düsseldorf.

Professor Sigwart is a pioneer of interventional cardiology. He is credited for conceiving and realizing endoluminal stenting, a non-surgical approach involving the insertion, through a balloon catheter, of a small metal scaffold (stent) into a blocked artery to hold it open. He was the first to successfully place coronary stents into coronary heart disease patients at the University Hospital in Lausanne in 1986. Stenting since then dramatically changed the approach to the treatment of coronary and extra-coronary arterial disease worldwide. Professor Sigwart’s creative spirit had also led him to develop pharmacologic septal ablation, another novel non-surgical technique for percutaneous treatment of patients suffering from hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy – a heart disease which causes abnormal enlargement of the septum that separates the heart ventricles, thus impeding the flow of blood from the heart to the body. In the ablation technique, a pharmacologically induced infarction is selectively produced in the septum to reduce its enlargement, with consequent physiologic and clinical benefits to the patient.

In addition to these major innovations, Professor Sigwart’s work on automation of cardiac catheterization contributed significantly to the current use of computers in haemodynamic evaluation. His sequencing of ischemic heart events was also widely acclaimed, while his fundamental observations on artificial heart valves resulted in significant modifications in their design. He is a prolific author with more than 500 publications and several books to his credit. His book, Handbook of Interventional Cardiology, was translated into Italian and Chinese, and is used as a standard text in many medical schools.

Professor Sigwart’s landmark contributions to the advancement of interventional cardiology were recognized by numerous awards, invited lectures and memberships of learned societies, professional institutions and editorial boards. Among his honors are an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Lausanne in 1999, the European Society of Cardiology Medal in 1996, the Grüntzig Award in 1996, and the Forssman Prize in 2001.

He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Angiology, the Royal College of Physicians (UK) and member or honorary member of major cardiology societies around the world.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Cynthia Kenyon earned her B.Sc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976 and her Ph.D. in Biology from MIT in 1981, where she discovered that DNA damaging agents activate a battery of DNA repair genes in E. coli. She received her post-doctoral training on the genetic basis of growth with Professor Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. Her subsequent career has been truly meteoric. She joined the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as an assistant professor of biochemistry and Biophysics in 1986, and became a full professor within only 8 years. In 1997, she was awarded the prestigious Herbert Boyer Distinguished Chair of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Professor Kenyon is noted for her work on the genetics of aging in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a tiny nematode developed by Brenner as an experimental animal model for research on molecular biology and genetics. During the early part of her career, she discovered that Hox genes, previously known to pattern the fruit fly segments, were also responsible for body-patterning of C. elegans. These findings demonstrated that Hox genes are not simply involved in segmentation, as originally thought, but instead formed part of a much more ancient and fundamental metazoan patterning system. Kenyon’s groundbreaking discovery in 1993 that a single-gene mutation (called daf-2) could double the lifespan of C. elegans, sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging. Her findings led to the discovery that an evolutionarily conserved hormone (Insulin/IGF-1-like) signaling system influences aging in other organisms, including mammals. This work inspired many scientists worldwide and opened new avenues for identifying genetic, metabolic and environmental factors that can influence the aging process. She published numerous research papers and reviewed articles in prestigious journals. Her studies suggested that clinical signs of aging were not inevitable and that the process of aging could be slowed down and its untoward effects could be eliminated or delayed.

Professor Kenyon’s outstanding contributions to the science of aging have been widely recognized. She is the recipient of a Searle Scholarship, a Packard Fellowship, and an Ellison Medical Foundation Fellowship. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and one of the founders of Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a firm which seeks to apply the results of research for making drugs to slow down the aging process.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Stephen Holgate received his B.Sc., M.B., B.S., and MD from London University, and D.Sc. from Southampton University. He completed a fellowship in rheumatic diseases and immunology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard University. He worked in London, and Salisbury before joining the faculty of Southampton University and Hospital in 1975. In 1986, he became an MRC Clinical Professor of Immunopharmacology at Southampton University and honorary consultant physician at Bournemouth and Southampton University Hospitals. He holds an FRCP from London, an FRCP from Edinburgh, and an MB, a BS honoris causa from the University of Ferrara in Italy.

Professor Holgate is the Joint Founder of Southampton’s full-time Specialist Asthma and Allergy Clinics, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Asthma, Allergy, and Inflammation Research (AAIR) Charity at Southampton General Hospital, and a Board Member of the Prince of Wales Foundation of Integrated Health. He is also Chair of the DEFRA Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards, the “Science in Health Group”, President of the National Allergy Strategy Group, and a member of the Department of Health Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution, and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

Professor Holgate is one of the leading authorities in the field of allergy, both nationally and internationally. A significant area of his research has been understanding the role of air pollutants, such as ozone, and other environmental factors (e.g., diet, common cold viruses and house dust mite allergens) in causing and in worsening allergies and asthma. Other important components of his research include the genesis, inflammatory nature and heritability of asthma. He has led the discovery of ADAM33 – the first of asthma genes.

Professor Holgate published over 700 papers and edited several textbooks on asthma and rhinitis. He received the MRC Dorothy Temple Cross Travel Fellowship; Royal College of Physicians’ Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Research; Scientific Achievements Award from the International Association of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (Stockholm) and WHO Rhône-Poulenc Rorer Award. He is an Honorary Fellow of the South African Pulmonology Society and Honorary Member of the Nordic Society of Allergology. He was also honored by numerous invited lectureships and visiting professorships.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Patrick Holt obtained a B.Sc., a Ph.D. and a D.Sc. from the University of Western Australia, and he is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Britain and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Earlier during his career, he was a researcher in the Department of Pathology at the University of Western Australia, then the Department of Microbiology, conducting studies in toxicology and tumor immunology. He also worked as a senior research fellow at the Clinical Immunology Research Unit of Princess Margaret Children’s Medical Research Foundation and spent one year as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Environmental Hygiene at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden before joining the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. He is currently Deputy Director and Head of the Division of Cell Biology at TVM Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, Senior Principal Research Fellow at the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and adjunct Professor of Microbiology at the University of Western Australia. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research and the Immunology Scientific Advisory Board of Entelos Inc.

Professor Holt is an allergy expert of international distinction. His pioneering research on the cellular and molecular basis of respiratory allergies and the mechanisms regulating immunological responses to inhaled allergens provided new perspectives on the causes and genesis of allergic respiratory diseases and the possibility of developing primary strategies for their prevention in childhood.

Author of numerous scientific publications in international journals, Professor Holt was awarded several prizes and honors, including an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Linköping in Sweden, the Pharmacia Foundation International Prize for Research in Allergy in 1989, Fellowship of the Collegium Allergolicum Internationale, Madeira, Spain in 1990, Pfizer’s Visiting Professorship in Allergic Diseases and Asthma at the University of Texas Medical Center in Galveston, U.S.A. in 1998, and a number of honorary lectureships. He also served as the Editor of the European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology in 1992.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Robert Purcell obtained a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Oklahoma State University in 1957, a master’s degree in biochemistry from Baylor University in 1960, and an MD from Duke University in 1962. After completing an internship in Pediatrics at Duke University Hospital, he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1963 to 1965. During that time, he carried out studies on respiratory viruses and mycoplasmal diseases before turning his attention to the study of hepatitis viruses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Laboratories in Bethesda, MD, where he became the Head of the Hepatitis Viruses Section of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1997, he joined the Senior Biomedical Research Services. He is also an adjunct Professor at several universities and a member of many medical, scientific and honor societies.

Professor Purcell authored and co-authored several books and more than 500 scientific articles, describing mainly his contributions to the discovery and characterization of the hepatitis viruses. His achievements include the first visualization of Hepatitis A virus (HAV) and the first serologic test for HAV, which helped in defining the epidemiology of this virus and its role in liver disease. His extensive laboratory and field research with Professor Gerin over the past three decades has led to the identification, characterization and screening of different hepatitis viruses and the development of vaccines to control most of them. His laboratory is currently working on the elucidation of molecular virology of these viruses.

Professor Purcell’s seminal contributions to the field of viral hepatitis earned him wide recognition. He received many other awards including the Gorgas Medal in 1977, the Distinguished Service Medal in 1978, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Duke University in 1978, the Squibb award of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 1980, the Gold Medal Award of the Canadian Liver Foundation in 1984, and the Inventor’s Incentive Award of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine in 1984. He is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and the US National Academy of Sciences. 

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

John Gerin obtained a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His interest in vaccine development started when he joined the Scientific Research Division of Abbott Laboratories in Chicago in 1964, where he participated in the development and testing of more than 25 vaccines for protection from respiratory pathogens. He became a Group Leader of Biophysical and Biochemical Virology at the Infectious Diseases Division of Abbott Laboratories in 1965. Two years later, he left to join Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 1968, he founded the Infectious Disease Division of ORNL, which joined Georgetown University Medical Center in 1978. He later became the Director of the Division of Molecular Virology and Immunology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Rockville, MD.

Professors Gerin and Robert Purcell collaborated for more than 30 years. Their extensive joint laboratory and field studies did not only lead to the discovery, identification, characterization and screening of different hepatitis viruses but also to the development of vaccines to control most of them. They were the first to show that a highly purified envelope protein from the hepatitis B virus protected non-human primates, a discovery that proved to be critical for the development of the hepatitis B vaccine. They were also responsible for the development of specific assays for the detection of hepatitis viruses, and reagents for standardized screening of blood and blood products. In addition, they developed a hepatitis A vaccine, collaborated with Professor Mario Rizzetto in the discovery of the hepatitis delta agent and discovered the waterborne hepatitis E virus in India and developed a candidate recombinant vaccine for its control. They also used relevant animal models to identify antiviral therapies for chronic type B hepatitis and studied molecular aspects of Hepatitis A virus.

Professor Gerin authored or co-authored more than 400 scientific articles and abstracts. He also edited the book Viral Hepatitis: Biological and Clinical Features, published in 1990, and served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis, Hepatology, the Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis, Hepatology, Viral Immunology, and Vaccine Research. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Albert Sabin Vaccine Institute, and an appointed member of the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Konrad Beyreuther graduated with a B.Sc. from Ludwigs-Maximilian University of Munich and a Ph.D. in Protein Chemistry from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. He completed his post-doctoral training in protein chemistry, molecular biology, and genetics at the Institute for Genetics in Cologne University (Germany), the Biological Laboratories at Harvard University (USA), and the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology at Cambridge University (U.K.). He obtained his Habilitation in Genetics from Cologne University and became a Professor in the Department of Biochemical Genetics at the Institute of Genetics at Cologne, before moving, in 1987, to the University of Heidelberg as a Professor of Molecular Biology and the Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuropathology.

Professor Beyreuther, jointly with Colin Masters, made significant advances in the molecular biology and chemistry of amyloid plaques that characterize the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). They determined the amino acid sequence of a major protein constituent of amyloid plaques and established model systems for in vitro and in vivo studies of amyloid formation in AD. These studies opened new avenues of research into the molecular biology, genetics and pathogenesis of AD that could lead to the development of novel ways to prevent its occurrence or slow down its progression. He also conducted detailed studies of synaptic dysfunction in AD. Earlier in his career, he succeeded, in collaboration with British scientists, in identifying the scrapie-associated protein in the brains of experimentally infected animals.

Professor Beyreuther published numerous scientific papers in international journals. His outstanding contributions to the study of neurodegenerative disorders, particularly AD earned him numerous awards and honors. He received the Gunther Buch Award for Research on Aging in 1987, Robert Pfleger Award for Medical Research in 1988, Feldberg Prize for Anglo-German Scientific Exchange in 1989, Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Disease Research in 1990, Metropolitan Life Foundation Award for Medical Research in 1991, IPSEN Foundation Prize in 1991, Max Planck Prize for International Scientific Collaboration in 1991, and Klaus-Joachim Zulch Prize for Neurology in 1995. He was also awarded an honoris causa degree in Medicine from Kuopio University, Finland in 1996 and the Windermere Traveling Professorship at Melbourne in 1997. He is a Member of the Heidelberg Academy for Humanities and Natural Sciences and Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldia in Halle and corresponding member of the Gottenger Academy for Sciences and Natural Sciences.

Professors Beyreuther and Masters have identified a protein known as 13A4 that is a major component of the amyloid plaques and have shown that a gene on chromosome 21 encodes for this protein which is part of a lamer protein called amyloid precursor protein (APP). They later studied the regulation of the synthesis and function of APP and its ability to bind to metallic ions. They hypothesized that the abnormal accumulation of pA4 protein underlies the neuronal changes that lead not only to Alzheimer’s disease but also to other degenerative diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Their research has opened the way to the rational development of novel drugs that can interfere with these pathological processes in hopes of offering some chance of limiting or ameliorating these devastating diseases in the near future. They have published 124 joint papers relating to this field as well as numerous other individual papers.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.