2013 Lasker awards honor biomedical researchers and champions of public service

摘要

Insights into the brain, hearing restoration, and medical improvements in developing countries represent the achievements of this year's recipients of the 2013 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Lasker -DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, and the Lasker - Bloomberg PublicService Award, "Thisyearthe Lasker Basic Award honors 2 scientists who discovered how the billions of neurons in our brain communicate with each other, and the Lasker Clinical Award honors 3 inventors who developed the modern cochlear implant that allows severely deaf people to hear. The Public Service Award recognizes a husband-wife team whose vision and dedication changed the way that complicated health challenges are addressed," said Claire Pomeroy, president of the Lasker Foundation. Breakthroughs in Brain Research Richard H. Scheller, PhD, of Genentech, and Thomas C. Siidhof, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine, earned the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for their discoveries concerningthe process of neurotransmit-ter release that underlies the brain's activities. Each was determined to tease apart the biological relay system that controls humans'every ability and emotion, with the ultimate goal of improving understanding of how people are able to think, feel, and act, as well as how diseases of the brain arise. "When I started my lab, how synapses work was one of the most important unanswered questions of brain research," said Sudhof. The principle behind synaptic transmission-the way nerve cells communicate and transmit signals-was discovered in the 1950s.