Associated Press
SEATTLE — Dr. Leland Hartwell says a toothpick was the most sophisticated technology he used when he first started studying cell division in yeast more than 30 years ago.
The president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and professor of genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle was named one of three Nobel Prize winners in medicine Monday for his work with yeast as a model for more complex human cells and his contributions to cancer research.
The $943,000 prize is shared with R. Timothy Hunt and Paul Nurse of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in England for basic discoveries in cell development, which is vital to understanding and finding a cure for cancer, the Nobel committee said.
A Hutchinson staffer called early Monday, and Hartwell’s wife had to wake him from a deep sleep.
"We were and remain shocked," Hartwell said at a news conference later in the day.
The scientists were honored for their study of the cell cycle, the process by which a cell grows and divides. Along the way, the cell must duplicate its chromosomes and distribute them equally to the two new cells.
Cell division happens several billion times every day in the adult human body, and most of the time it goes fine. But when something goes wrong, it can lead to cancer, which is characterized by runaway cell division.
The Nobel winners all discovered genes and proteins that regulate the cell cycle.
The scientists’ work is "a major contribution to our understanding of a basic biological process that has profound implications for cancer research," said Helen Piwnica-Worms, a cell cycle researcher at Washington University in St. Louis.
For example, scientists have already started testing drugs designed to influence the cell cycle and make cancer cells stop dividing or die. Also, careful study of which regulatory molecules are overactive or underactive in a patient’s tumor could one day help doctors decide on the best treatment.
Hartwell, 61, was honored for experiments that began in 1970. Working with baker’s yeast cells because they are relatively simple and easy to manipulate, he discovered more than 100 genes involved in controlling the cell cycle.
Hartwell, a Los Angeles native, joined the Hutchinson center faculty in 1996 and became president and director in 1997. He is the Hutchinson center’s second Nobel laureate. The first was Dr. E. Donnall Thomas in 1990 for research on bone-marrow transplants.
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