The Mattia award was established in 1972 by Hoffmann La-Roche Inc. in honor of V.D. Mattia, who served as president and CEO of the company from 1965 to 1971 and was instrumental in setting up the molecular biology institute. Nine of the 25 winners to date have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize, the most recent being 1989 chemistry Nobelist Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who received the Mattia award in 1987.
Rothman, whose work has led to a better understanding of transmission of signals between brain cells and mechanisms of hormone release into the bloodstream, has devoted most of his career to elucidating the methods by which proteins are transported within cells. Over the course of his investigations, which began while he was at Stanford University in the late 1970s, he has studied all the stages involved in the process. He proposed a single underlying ...
