One Baltimore scientist has discovered what may be the key to aging and cancer's Achilles' heel. Another invented a technique universally used to pry loose the secrets of cells.
Now Carol Greider of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Joseph Gall of the Carnegie Institution at Homewood have been awarded the most prestigious prize in American medicine for their work - the Lasker Award.
Nicknamed the "American Nobel," each Albert Lasker Medical Research Award comes with a $100,000 honorarium. It's also considered a stepping-stone to science's most famous laurel: Seventy-one Lasker recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
This year's awards - five in all - were to be announced today by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, which started the prize in 1946. They will be handed out Friday at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.
Aaron Beck, 85, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, won this year's clinical prize for developing cognitive therapy. The technique, a form of "talk therapy," has transformed the treatment of depression, panic attacks, eating disorders and other psychiatric conditions, judges said.
Gall, who works at the Carnegie Instituttion's little-known department of embryology on San Martin Drive, will receive the Lasker for special achievement. The award, given out every other year, honors a lifetime body of work.
Unknown outside scientific circles, the soft-spoken 78-year-old Roland Park resident is revered within them: "He is one of the great cell biologists of our times," says Dr. Joseph Goldstein, a Nobel laureate at the University of Texas and chair of the Lasker jury.
In its citation, the jury praised Gall's numerous insights into how cells function - especially heredity-bearing chromosomes - and his invention of "in situ hybridization."
The technique, which allows scientists to pinpoint the locations of genetic material within cells, is used in labs around the world for studying growing embryos, diagnosing disease, and numerous other applications.
The award also honors Gall for being an early champion of women in science.
Greider, 45, will share the basic research award with two other scientists for co-discovering telomerase, an unusual substance that rebuilds the tips of chromosomes and ultimately determines the life span of cells. Twenty years after its discovery, it's one of the hottest areas in biomedicine.
