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 William Kaelin at the U.S. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard
Medical School said he was overwhelmed to get a pre-dawn call to say
he and two other doctors, Gregg Semenza of Johns Hopkins University
and Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford University, had won the 9-million
Swedish-crown ($913,000) prize.
"I don't usually get phone calls at 5 a.m., but I knew this was
'Nobel Monday', so it was either going to be a poorly timed mobile
call or extremely good news," he told Reuters by telephone. "My
heart started racing. It was almost surreal."
Ratcliffe, who is also clinical research director at the Francis
Crick Institute in London, said in a statement he was "honoured and
delighted at the news".
The scientists' work established the basis for understanding of how
oxygen levels are sensed by cells - a discovery that is being
explored by medical researchers seeking to develop treatments for
various diseases that work by either activating or blocking the
body's oxygen-sensing machinery.
Their work centres on the hypoxic response - the way the body reacts
to oxygen flux - and "revealed the elegant mechanisms by which our
cells sense oxygen levels and respond" said Andrew Murray, an expert
at Britain's University of Cambridge who congratulated the three.
"VITAL INGREDIENT"
"Oxygen is the vital ingredient for the survival of every cell in
our bodies. Too little – or too much – can spell disaster.
Understanding how evolution has equipped cells to detect and respond
to fluctuating oxygen levels helps answer fundamental questions,"
said Venki Ramakrishnan, president of Britain's Royal Society
scientific academy.
"As (this) work.. shows us, it also gives insights into the way
these processes continue to shape our health and wellbeing."
Randall Johnson, a professor at Sweden's Karolinska Institute where
the prize is awarded, said it was "a prize that really tells us the
fundamental truth about how cells work".
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During exercise, for example, the body uses oxygen at a rapid pace,
"and this is a switch that helps the cell figure out how much oxygen
it's getting and how it should behave."
"If you have a stroke there's suddenly no oxygen going to the
brain... Those cells, if they are going to survive, need to find a
way to adapt to that level of oxygen," he said.
Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes given each year. The
prizes for achievements in science, peace and literature have been
awarded since 1901 and were created in the will of dynamite inventor
and businessman Alfred Nobel.
Nobel medicine laureates have included scientific greats such as
Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, and Karl
Landsteiner, who identified separate blood types and so enabled safe
transfusions to be widely introduced.
Thomas Perlmann, a member of the Nobel Assembly, said he had reached
Kaelin by phone early on Monday to tell him on the award. "He was
really happy, almost speechless," Perlmann said.
Last year American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the
prize for discoveries about how to harness the immune system in
cancer therapies.
(Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Simon Johnson, Anna Ringstrom,
Johannes Hellstrom, Johan Ahlander, Colm Fulton and Helena Soderpalm
in Stockholm; Writing and additional reporting by Kate Kelland in
London, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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