American, 2 Britons Win Medical Nobel

An American and two Britons won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for groundbreaking research into organ growth and cell death work that has opened new avenues for treating cancer, stroke and other diseases.

The prize, worth about $1 million, is shared by H. Robert Horvitz, 55, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and British citizens Sydney Brenner, 75, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and John E. Sulston, 60, who is retired from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.

Collectively, their work provided the first solid evidence that cells in the body carry a "self-destruct" program to kill off excess cells.

But sometimes the process goes awry. In cancer, abnormal cells fail to turn on their self-destruct program, so they grow into tumors. In other cases, like AIDS and stroke, the program turns on and kills healthy cells. Some scientists suspect this latter problem might also occur in degenerative brain illnesses like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

So the prize-winning work opened up a new field for treatment: trying to treat disease by influencing the cell-death program. Some drugs designed to do that are now being tested in people.

In fact, standard cancer chemotherapy acts by turning on the program in cancerous cells, but scientists want to find drugs that will do that without the current treatment's side effects, said Hermann Steller, a professor of cancer biology at Rockefeller University in New York.

"There is really great hope that will happen," said Steller, who is also a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The new Nobel laureates worked together and separately. Their prize-winning research was done in a tiny transparent worm called C. elegans, and the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which awards the prize, cited Brenner for calling researchers' attention to that creature.

His work "laid the foundation for this year's prize," the committee said.

In 1974, Brenner showed that a chemical could induce specific gene mutations in the worm, defects that could be linked to particular effects on organ development.

Sulston developed techniques to observe all the cell divisions in the life of the worm, from the fertilized egg to the 959 cells of an adult. He discovered that specific cells always died through programmed cell death and demonstrated the first mutations of genes participating in the process.

Under the microscope, "we could actually see programmed cell death in action, so beautiful, so clear and so reproducible," Sulston recalled Monday.

Sulston said winning the Nobel was "tremendously exciting for me because once again it reinforces the power of fundamental research."

Horvitz, in 1986, reported the first two identified "death genes" in the worm. He showed that humans have a gene similar to one of them. Scientists now know that humans have a family of such genes.

Horvitz learned of his Nobel win while vacationing in the French Alps.

"It was quite enjoyable to have champagne before lunch in France," Horvitz said, in a cellular telephone call to a news conference at MIT on Monday.

"I would find nothing more gratifying than to learn that one or more of my discoveries led specifically to pharmaceutical treatments and cures for human diseases," he said.

"That's a dream. At this point, I think that dream is still tenable."

The award for medicine opened a week of Nobel Prizes that culminates Friday with the prestigious peace prize, the only one revealed in Oslo, Norway.

The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry and economics awards Wednesday in the Swedish capital.

As in years past, the date for the literature prize has not been set. But it always falls on a Thursday, usually the same week as the other awards.

The awards always are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who established the prize.