SAN FRANCISCO, September 18. Since 1962, more than half of those honored with the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, often called "America's Nobels," have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize. The whisperings about a cell-cycle Nobel were only heightened by the 1998 Basic Medical Lasker, which was shared by Lee Hartwell, Paul Nurse and Yoshio Masui for their discovery of a conserved cell cycle engine. Now the 2000 Basic Medical Lasker has been bestowed on three researchers for their work on ubiquitination, a process that controls protein destruction. Perhaps the most famous targets of the ubiquitination system are various cyclins that control progression through the cell cycle.