Two scientists from U.S. and one from Britain share Nobel Medicine Prize

Record ID: 1435528

  • Title: Two scientists from U.S. and one from Britain share Nobel Medicine Prize
  • Date: 7th October 2019
  • Summary: CAMERA OPERATORS JOHNSON BEING INTERVIEWED JOHNSON'S HANDS (SOUNDBITE) (English) MEMBER OF THE NOBEL ASSEMBLY, PROFESSOR RANDALL JOHNSON, SAYING: "It's a prize that really tells us a fundamental truth about how cells work. If you think about a cell and a body - it's sitting inside a three-dimensional structure and of course, there is always oxygen, for the most part, outside of us but inside of us, the levels of oxygen are changing all the time. You can think of, for example, your muscles when you're exercising, you're using up oxygen at a much more rapid pace than you can get it into the muscles, so the cell has to adapt itself to these shifting levels of oxygen and this is a switch that helps the cell figure out how much oxygen it's getting and how it should behave as a result of that." JOHNSON'S HANDS (SOUNDBITE) (English) MEMBER OF THE NOBEL ASSEMBLY, PROFESSOR RANDALL JOHNSON, SAYING: "This is a fundamental aspect of how a cell and a tissue and an animal works, and so we need to know this so we can better understand ourselves, purely and simply. So from that standpoint, it's something that will and is in biology textbooks that everybody will learn about when they learn about basic aspects of biology. From the standpoint of application in medicine, there are already a number of things, drugs that are being developed based on this understanding and many more I think will come into play as time goes on." JOHNSON BEING INTERVIEWED
  • Embargoed: 21st October 2019 13:28
  • Keywords: Nobel medicine William Kaelin Sir Peter Ratcliffe Gregg Semenza oxygen
  • Location: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
  • City: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
  • Country: Sweden
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVA005B03LC93
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Two scientists from the United States and one from Britain won the 2019 Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday (October 7) for finding how cells adapt to fluctuating oxygen levels, paving the way for new strategies to fight diseases such as anaemia and cancer.
    The Nobel award-giving body said U.S.-born researchers William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza shared the prize equally with Peter Ratcliffe, who was born in Britain.
    "The seminal discoveries by this year's Nobel laureates revealed the mechanism for one of life's most essential adaptive processes," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement on awarding the prize of 9 million Swedish crowns (913,000 U.S. dollar).
    Their research established the basis for the understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological functions, the institute said.
    Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievements in science, peace and literature have been awarded since 1901 and were created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
    (Production: Bjorn Lockstrom, Ilze Filks)
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2019. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register