L-R: Douglas Lowy, Michael Hall, John SchillerLASKER FOUNDATIONDouglas Lowy, the acting director of the National Cancer Institute, first learned about vaccines in 1955 when he accompanied his mother, a physician, to a presentation by Jonas Salk about the results of his newly developed polio vaccine. “I learned far more about polio virus and the vaccine than was probably appropriate for a 12-year-old boy,” Lowy said during a press conference today (September 6) announcing his receipt of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
Decades after his introduction to vaccines, Lowy would launch a long-lasting collaboration with John Schiller, deputy chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology at the NCI, culminating in the development of a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV), for which the duo won the 2017 award. “[We] have worked together for more than 30 years,” Lowy said, “and it has been an extraordinarily effective collaboration where together we have accomplished more than either of us could have done separately.”
This year’s Basic Medical Research Award honored the work of Michael Hall, a cell biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who discovered the TOR (target of rapamycin) pathway and its role in cell growth. During the press conference, Hall said the achievement was an ...
