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Umberto Veronesi obtained his M.D. in 1951 from Milan University, and after brief periods in England and France, he joined the Italian National Institute for Cancer Research in Milan as a volunteer. He qualified as a Professor of Pathological Anatomy in 1957 and a Professor of Surgery in 1961 at Milan University. He served as consultant pathologist and surgeon at the Italian National Institute for Cancer Research, and was the Scientific Director of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. He was appointed as a Minister of Health from 2000-2001. During his long and distinguished career, Professor Veronesi directed many cancer research programs and societies. He later resumed his position of the Scientific Director of the European Institute of Oncology, the President of “Science for Peace” and consultant to the Italian Supreme Health Council. In 2003, he established the Umberto Veronesi Foundation which aims to spread scientific culture and to provide free and rapid access to cancer research in Europe.

Professor Veronesi was the first to demonstrate that conservative breast surgery and radiotherapy, which leaves the breast intact, substitutes mutilating mastectomy and yet obtains the same cure rate. He invented the technique of quadrantectomy, thereby challenging the common belief among surgeons that cancers could be treated only with aggressive surgery. Since then, he has been supporting and promoting scientific research aimed to improve conservative surgical technique. He developed new research on sentinel node biopsy procedure to avoid axillary dissection when the lymph nodes are not involved. He also contributed to breast cancer prevention, conducting studies on tamoxifen and retinoids and verifying their capabilities to prevent the formation of carcinoma, and has always been an activist in many anti-tobacco campaigns.

Professor Veronesi published more than 600 papers as well as several textbooks. He served as an editor-in-chief of Surgical Oncology: A European Handbook and a co-editor of Oxford Textbook of Oncology. He was awarded many ‘honoris causa’ in Medicine and numerous prizes and medals. He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Medicine at University College Dublin, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. In addition, he was an elected fellow or member of several major medical and scientific societies related to cancer research, including European and American Association for Cancer Research. He was also the president of several prestigious societies including the International Union Against Cancer, the European Society of Surgical Oncology, the European Society of Mastology, the Federation of European Cancer Societies, the International Society of Cancer Chemoprevention, Breast Cancer International, and the WHO International Group for the Study of Melanoma.

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

Axel Ullrich studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen in 1971, and earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Heidelberg University in 1975. He then took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, before joining Genentech, San Francisco, in 1979. In 1988, he became the Director of the Department of Molecular Biology of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, and was appointed the Administrative Director of the Institute in 1999. Throughout his remarkable career that bridges academia with the private sector, Professor Ullrich co-founded three biotechnology companies: SUNGEN Inc. (USA), U3 Pharma AG (Germany) and Axxima Pharmaceuticals AG (Germany).

Professor Ulrich’s groundbreaking research in the field of signal transduction helped significantly in elucidating major fundamental molecular mechanisms that govern the physiology of normal cells and provided insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms of major human diseases such as Diabetes and Cancer. His efforts to translate his basic scientific discoveries into medical applications led to the development of Humulin (Human Insulin for the treatment of Diabetes), the first therapeutic agent to be developed through gene-based technology, as well as Herceptin, the first target-directed, gene-based cancer therapy for the treatment of metastatic breast carcinoma and SU11248 (Pfizer) a multi-targeted drug for the treatment of GIST and Renal Cell Carcinoma. His scientific work is published in more than 450 articles in international journals, and with over 58000 citations he is one of the ten most cited scientists over the past 25 years worldwide.

Professor Ulrich received numerous awards including: Paul Langerhans Medal of the German Diabetes Society in 1987, Berthold Medal of the German Society for Endocrinology in 1988, the Antoine Lacassagne Prize of the Cancer Society of France in 1991, Gold Medal of the Lorenzini Medical Science Foundation of Italy in 1997, German Cancer Research Prize in 1998, Bruce F. Cain Memorial Award of the American Association of Cancer Research in 2000, and Robert Koch Prize in 2001. He is an Honorary Professor at the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai (China) and the University of Tübingen, and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and the German Academy of Natural Scientists “Leopoldina.” In 2001, he was named by Time Magazine Europe as one of 25 European tech leaders “who are changing how we work, live and play,” and was also named “International Fellow” of the Garvan Institute of Cancer Research in Sydney, Australia. He also serves on the advisory boards of several internationally renowned institutions in Europe, USA, and Asia.

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

Eugene Braunwald moved to the United States in 1939. He received his B.A. and M.D. (Honor) from New York University in 1949 and 1952 respectively, and completed his residency in Cardiology at Johns Hopkins University in 1958. In 1968, he joined the University of California, San Diego, where he was the founding Chair of the Department of Medicine and served as Chief of Cardiology and Clinical Director at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. From 1972 to 1996, he chaired the Department of Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, MA. He was the President of the American Society for Clinical Investigations and the Association of Professors of Medicine. He is currently Distinguished Heresy Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Faculty Dean for Academic Programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Academic Head of Partners in Healthcare System.

Professor Braunwald is at the forefront of investigators of congestive heart failure and acute coronary syndromes. Over the past 40 years, he conducted pioneering research on the hemodynamic response to surgical correction of valvular disorders; he also developed pioneering diagnostic techniques and discovered the clinical entity of idiopathic, hypertrophic subacute stenosis. His groundbreaking studies on the role of the autonomic nervous system and its mediators in the physiologic adjustments to heart failure and the mechanisms of contraction of the normal and failing heart had profoundly influenced present knowledge of the pathophysiology of congestive heart failure. Professor Braunwald also made seminal contributions to the treatment of heart failure, leading to large-scale clinical trials that altered treatment strategies worldwide. He was also instrumental in running the “Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction” studies, which developed the concepts of thrombosis superimposed on atherosclerosis as the pathological bases for acute myocardial infarction.

Professor Braunwald’s work dramatically expanded knowledge of heart disease in the areas of congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, and valvular heart disease. Professor Braunwald received countless awards and honors, including eight honorary doctorate degrees. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Scientist award from the American College of Cardiology in 1986 and the Research Achievement Award of the American Heart Association in 1972. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Britain and the American College of Chest Physicians and the only cardiologist who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, In 1996, Harvard University incepted the Eugene Braunwald Professorship in Medicine as a permanently endowed chair, and in 1999 the American Heart Association incepted the annual Eugene Braunwald Academic Mentorship Award in his honor.

He contributed to thousands of publications. He was the founding editor of the premier cardiology textbook, Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine, and editor-in-chief of the leading textbook Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, as well as editor of two distinguished cardiovascular textbooks. He is also Editor-in-Chief of MD Consult Cardiology.

Professor Braunwald and his colleagues explored, identified, and established the role of the sympathetic nervous system in congestive heart failure. They developed a novel model in animals for congestive heart failure that has been used by many Laboratories to evaluate pathophysiologic studies and effects of therapy. Professor Braunwald was amongst the first to delineate the importance of idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis and the physiologic abnormalities of this myopathic process. He and Robert Kioner were the first to develop the concept of post- Ischaemic left ventricular dysfunction after temporary reduction and coronary flow. This key concept relating to reversible left ventricular dysfunction, its causes, consequences and opportunities for modulation remains a contemporaneously important issue.

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

Finn Waagstein graduated from Aarhus University Medical School in 1956, and was certified by the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates at Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A. the same year. He completed his training in surgery for one year, and spent another four years of training in internal medicine in Gavle Community Hospital in Sweden. In 1970, he was a Resident at the Department of Cardiology at Sahlgrenska University Hospital and enrolled as a research fellow in cardiology from 1970-1976. His doctoral degree incorporated his first clinical observations on the use of beta-blockers in acute myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure. He was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg in 1980. He assisted in establishing and directing the first Swedish heart transplant program and has been the director of the heart failure and cardiomyopathy research program since 1990, developing it into one of the most important facilities of its kind in the whole of Scandinavia. He is currently Professor of Cardiology and senior physician at Wallenberg Laboratory in the Department of Cardiology at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Professor Waagstein initiated the brilliant concept of beta-blocking in the treatment of chronic heart failure. Despite earlier skepticism, controlled clinical trials and pathophysiological studies led by Waagstein ultimately resulted in worldwide recognition of beta blockade as an important modality in treating heart failure. He also contributed to studies on the role of autoimmune processes in the development of dilated cardiomyopathy, a major cause of heart failure in young and middle-age patients.

Professor Waagstein published more than 250 scientific papers, review articles and book chapters. He also gave keynote lectures at many international academic institutions and professional societies worldwide. He is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, a founding member of the Society’s Working Group on Heart Failure in 1994, and recipient of its Medal in 2001. He was also the Chairman of the Working Group on Myocardial and Pericardial Disease (1997-2001). He received several awards in addition to the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine in 2002, including the European Society of Cardiology Denolin Award Lecture and Silver Medal in 2001, and the Lars Werkö Prize in 2002.

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

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.