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The Lasker Prizes (regarded as the US’s most prestigious biomedical research awards) were announced (Science article) (The [URL='http://www.laskerfoundation.org/']Lasker Foundation's Awards Announcement)[/URL] and are interesting to me for two reasons:
1) Michael Hall, 64, of the University of Basel’s Biozentrum in Switzerland:
"discovering how a group of proteins called target of rapamycin (TOR) direct cell growth. In yeast, humans, and many other organisms, TOR proteins sense the availability of nutrients and other growth signals, such as hormones, and regulate cell size accordingly." (Target of- names often are the result of using a drug to find a bunch of specific proteins (responding or binding a drug)).
Control of cell size is something central to lots of interesting things biologically. And I never heard of these system before. I'll have find out more about it. Cell size control is important in development, cell division, and general cell morphology. There will be lots of these processes interacting with these proteins, if it is in fact a cell growth controller.
2) Two politically controversial awards:
1) Michael Hall, 64, of the University of Basel’s Biozentrum in Switzerland:
"discovering how a group of proteins called target of rapamycin (TOR) direct cell growth. In yeast, humans, and many other organisms, TOR proteins sense the availability of nutrients and other growth signals, such as hormones, and regulate cell size accordingly." (Target of- names often are the result of using a drug to find a bunch of specific proteins (responding or binding a drug)).
Control of cell size is something central to lots of interesting things biologically. And I never heard of these system before. I'll have find out more about it. Cell size control is important in development, cell division, and general cell morphology. There will be lots of these processes interacting with these proteins, if it is in fact a cell growth controller.
2) Two politically controversial awards:
- People (Douglas Lowy, 75, and John Schiller, 64; of National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD) who made the the HPV vaccine. May have already saved lives. Probably not liked by: anti-vaccine groups, those not liking changing sex norms ("conservatives?").
- Planned Parenthood: Obviously politically controversial, since Republicans want to defund it because they do abortions.