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Three Scientists Share Chemistry Prize

Posted on: Wednesday, 6 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose won the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for their work in discovering a process that lets cells destroy unwanted proteins.

Ciechanover, 57, Hershko, 67, and Irwin Rose, 78, were honoured by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work in the 1980s that discovered one of the cell's most important cyclical processes, regulated protein degradation.

The marked proteins are then chopped to pieces. When such degradation fails to work correctly, the result can be diseases like cervical cancer and cystic fibrosis. Research in this area could lead to new drugs for those diseases and others, the academy said.

"Thanks to the work of the three laureates it is now possible to understand at molecular level how the cell controls a number of central processes by breaking down certain proteins and not others," the academy said in its citation. "Examples of processes governed by ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation are cell division, DNA repair, quality control of newly produced proteins, and important parts of the immune defence."

Ciechanover is director of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel, while Hershko, originally from Hungary, is a professor there. Rose is a specialist at the department of physiology and biophysics at the college of medicine at the University of California-Irvine.

All three will share the 10 million kronor (US$1.3 million) cash prize.

This year's award announcements began on Monday with the Nobel Prize in medicine going to Americans Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck.

Axel and Buck were selected by a committee at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute for their work on the sense of smell.

They clarified the intricate biological pathway from the nose to the brain that lets people sense smells.

On Tuesday, Americans David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus.

The winner of the literature prize will be announced today. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced on October 11. The winner of the coveted peace prize the only one not awarded in Sweden will be announced tomorrow in Oslo, Norway.

Recent winners

Below is a list showing recent winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry:

2003: Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon, United States, for their research on how key materials enter or leave cells in the body and their discoveries concerning tiny pores called "channels" on the surface of cells.

2002: John B. Fenn, United States, Koichi Tanaka, Japan, and Kurt Wuethrich, Switzerland, for developing methods used in identifying and analyzing large biological molecules.

2001: William S. Knowles and K. Barry Sharpless, United States, and Ryoji Noyori, Japan, for showing how to better control chemical reactions, paving the way for drugs to treat heart ailments and Parkinson's disease.

2000: Alan J. Heeger and Alan G. MacDiarmid, United States, and Hideki Shirakawa, Japan, for the discovery that plastic conducts electricity and for the development of conductive polymers.

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