- Title: He couldn't get his research published. Now he wins the Nobel Prize.
- Date: 7th October 2019
- Summary: BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, UNITED STATES (OCTOBER 7, 2019) (REUTERS) ***WARNING: CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE, ARRIVING AT NEWS CONFERENCE TO APPLAUSE AND CHEERS PEOPLE STANDING AND APPLAUDING SEMENZA (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: "Believe it or not, this has been a really lousy year for me. May 31st, I somehow ended up walking through the hallways of my home in the middle of the night and fell down a flight of stairs and broke my neck has fractured four cervical vertebrae and it was a pretty serious injury." PEOPLE LISTENING DURING NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: "I was in a daze and I was kind of half-awake and yeah, it is kind of just - you know, I was not able to really say much of anything because I was so shocked and surprised as I said, particularly given the experience I've had over the last several months and it was certainly not something I was expecting." WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: Yeah I'm a deep sleeper so. I didn't wake up. Eventually, by the time I got to the phone, it was too late and so I said to myself, I bet, I wonder if this is somebody's idea of a bad joke. (LAUGHTER FROM CROWD) So, I went back to sleep or tried to and it was quite a few minutes, I think they were debating whether to call me back or not." WIDE OF SEMENZA AT NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: "We submitted it to these so-called top tier journals and they did not find it to be of 'sufficient interest' to warrant publication. I was very fortunate that Victor McKusick, one of my mentors, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Victor had the paper reviewed for PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and it was accepted, and it's been cited over 5,000 times." WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: "It turns out that because oxygen is so critical to life, many of the common human diseases have derangements in ability to maintain proper oxygen levels. So for example, in a cancer, the cancer cells divide very rapidly, consume a lot of oxygen and the cancer cells become very hypoxic. And what we've learned is that when they become hypoxic, they turn on genes that enable them to invade, metastasize and spread throughout the body. And whereas most of the chemotherapy drugs are designed to kill dividing cells that are well oxygenated, there are no treatments that are approved to treat the hypoxic cells within the cancer. And we believe it's these cells that survive the therapy and come back and kill the patient." AUDIENCE LISTENING DURING NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: “I think this is the greatest place to do research (Johns Hopkins University). It has the greatest colleagues and the greatest sense of collegiality of any place I know. So, there are places where there are lots of smart people and know how to do all sorts of things. There are places where everybody is very friendly but there are very few places that have both of those like Hopkins where there's always someone who knows what you need to know and they're willing to help you." WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: "We never know what will be the critical experiment. So, we just you know continue every day to try to generate data, to move, move forward and I think the joy has to be in those small steps every day." WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. GREGG SEMENZA OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ONE OF THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE SAYING: "MY day started before 4:00 a.m. and it's been nonstop since then. And I did have a little bit of champagne, I must confess. Thank you very much." AUDIENCE STANDING TO GIVE SEMENZA A STANDING OVATION
- Embargoed: 21st October 2019 18:38
- Keywords: Nobel prize Medicine Gregg Semenza Johns Hopkins University oxygen
- Location: BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, UNITED STATES
- City: BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, UNITED STATES
- Country: USA
- Topics: Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA001B03N8ZR
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:Dr. Greg Semenza won the 2019 Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday (October 7) after having his initial research rejected by major scientific journals and after enduring what he described as a 'lousy year.'
"We submitted it to these so-called top tier journals and they did not find it to be of 'sufficient interest' to warrant publication," Semenza said during a news conference at Johns Hopkins University, where Semenza has spent his entire career.
A former mentor of Semenza's at the National Academy of Sciences urged PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) to consider the journal which has since been cited over 5,000 times, Semenza said.
Semenza, an admitted 'deep sleeper,' slept through the call from the Nobel committee. When they reached him on a second attempt, he said he celebrated with a 'little bit of champagne.'
"I was so shocked and surprised as I said, particularly given the experience I've had over the last several months and it was certainly not something I was expecting," he said.
Earlier in the year, he suffered a serious fall and broke his neck, he explained.
Asked about advice for others toiling in medical research, Semenza said, "We never know what will be the critical experiment. So, we just you know continue every day to try to generate data, to move move forward and I think the joy has to be in those small steps every day."
Semenza was one of three people - two Americans and a Briton to win 2019 Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for their work discovering a molecular switch that regulates how cells adapt to fluctuating oxygen levels, opening up new approaches to treating heart failure, anemia and cancer.
William Kaelin at the U.S. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School said he was overwhelmed to get a pre-dawn call to say he along with Semenza and Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford University, had won the 9-million Swedish-crown ($913,000) prize.
The scientists' work established the basis for understanding of how oxygen levels are sensed by cells - a discovery that is being explored by medical researchers seeking to develop treatments for various diseases that work by either activating or blocking the body's oxygen-sensing machinery.
Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes given 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.
Nobel medicine laureates have included scientific greats such as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, and Karl Landsteiner, who identified separate blood types and so enabled safe transfusions to be widely introduced.
Last year, American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the prize for discoveries about how to harness the immune system in cancer therapies.
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