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The 2021 Lasker awards, announced on Friday, are awarded to scientists whose work is crucial to Covid-19 vaccines, to scientists who discovered how to control the firing of neurons with light beams, and to a researcher whose influential work and leadership changed medical science. .

The awards are named Mary and Alfred Lasker. Ms. Lasker was an advocate of medical research, and her husband is sometimes referred to as the father of modern advertising. These are among the most prestigious awards in medicine, and many Lasker winners have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize. Recipients in each category share the $250,000 prize. NS No awards given in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

An important development that led to Covid vaccines.

Katalin Kariko, senior vice president at BioNTech and professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Drew Weissman shared this year’s Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.

In retrospect, Dr. Kariko and Dr. Their breakthrough was evident in 2005 when Weissman proudly published a surprising finding they made about messenger RNA, also known as mRNA, which instructs cells to make proteins. Scientists realized that when they added mRNA to cells, the cells instantly destroyed it. But they can prevent this destruction by slightly modifying the mRNA. When they add the modified mRNA to cells, it can prompt the cells to make any protein of their choice for a short time.

But at the time, most scientists were uninterested in the technology that would become the cornerstone of mRNA vaccines because they thought there were better ways to immunize.

their paper, Published in Immunity in 2005 It received little attention after being repeatedly rejected by other magazines. The discovery seemed esoteric.

Dr. Weissman and Dr. Kariko wrote grants to continue their work. Their application was denied. Eventually, two biotech companies took notice: Moderna in the United States and BioNTech in Germany. Companies have explored the use of mRNA vaccines for flu, cytomegalovirus, and other diseases, but none have come out of clinical trials for years.

Then the coronavirus appeared. Outstanding vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Dr. Kariko and Dr. The change that Weissman discovered.

The two scientists are now showering prizes for their discoveries, including the $3 million Breakthrough Prize and the $1 million Albany Prize.

Dr. Kariko said in an interview this week that her greatest reward is to have been involved in developing a vaccine that has saved so many lives.

“It is enough for me to know that I have contributed, to know that so many people have been helped,” he said.

Dr. Weissman said in an interview this week that he and Dr. Despite Kariko being honored, Study leading to mRNA vaccines involved More than just manipulating mRNA.

“People should know that this is not a one-time trial that we did and the vaccine was made in 10 months,” he said. “We’ve made the modified mRNA and we take the honors, but the vaccines are based on more than 20 years of work by Kati and I and are studied by hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists.”

New clues to the neural roots of behavior.

Karl Deisseroth of Stanford, Professor Emeritus Peter Hegemann of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, and Dieter Oesterhelt of Humboldt University of Berlin shared the Albert Lasker Prize for Basic Medical Research.

Dr. An experiment by Deisseroth and his students in 2007 seemed miraculous. They shined a blue light through an optical fiber they inserted into a mouse’s brain. It was aimed at a neuron that controls the movement of the whiskers. The whiskers twitched. Dr. Deisseroth could control the movements of mice with a narrow beam of light.

But that experiment Built on years of work.

The road began in the late 1960s Dr. When Oesterhelt caught the interest of bacteria living in salt marshes. Bacteria were introduced in 1971 by Dr. It’s surrounded by a purple membrane that contains a light-sensing protein, Oesterhelt reported. In response to light, the protein pumps ions into the cell one by one. This was intriguing because when nerves fire, they achieve a similar result by opening a tunnel in their membrane that allows ions to enter.

Another leap forward In 1991, working on algae that could sense and swim toward light, Dr. Hegemann, algae Dr. It happened when he reported that Oesterhelt was using a protein associated with the protein in his bacteria. In the presence of light, the protein opens a tunnel in the membrane of the algae, allowing ions to enter.

Dr. Deisseroth thought that these proteins would open ion channels and convert light into electrical activity. So he set out to experiment to see if adding genes for light-sensing proteins to nerve cells would trigger their firing. This led to experiments with mouse whiskers. a series of studies shows that nerve fire can be controlled by light.

Now, using the light-sensitive proteins they add to cells, scientists around the world are activating and silencing neurons in animals to study behaviors ranging from hunger and thirst to anxiety and parenting.

Also a psychiatrist, Dr. Deisseroth said his message to the public in an interview this week was that the study “shows the value of pure basic science that is hardly driven by influence.”

Initially, no one had any way of knowing that work on algae and bacteria would allow researchers to know which behaviors would be controlled by individual neurons. But the promise is huge, said Dr. With this kind of information for psychiatric disorders, Deisseroth added, you could one day “design any type of therapy.”

Honoring a scientific career through many actions.

David Baltimore, now professor emeritus at Caltech, received the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science.

Dr. Baltimore entered the molecular biology pantheon in 1970 when he made a surprising discovery. A rule put forward by Francis Crick, known as the Central Dogma, was wrong. He stated that the information in cells only went in one direction – DNA directed the formation of RNA, which directed the formation of proteins. However, Dr. Baltimore found that the flow of information can also go from RNA to DNA.

In 1975, just 37 years old, Dr. Baltimore shared the Nobel Prize for this work.

This was just the beginning of his career that led to major discoveries and scientific leadership positions in cancer and immunology. Baltimore was the founding director of MIT’s Whitehead Biomedical Research Institute, president of Rockefeller University, and president of Caltech.

During the AIDS crisis, Dr. Baltimore was co-chairman of an influential committee of the National Academy of Sciences that helped revive research and a public health campaign.

In an interview this week, he said his greatest satisfaction is his work in basic science, which has both discoveries and implications for medicine and society.

“I have had an impact on cancer, AIDS and immunology by focusing on basic science. And that’s extremely rewarding,” said Dr. Baltimore. “It proves the adage that basic science is the seed corn of social impact.”