Lasker Awards Go To Three Scientists And A Senator

This year, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation chose to honor Vincent P. Dole, the physician who first recognized that narcotic addiction is a physiological problem that can be treated medically, and two molecular biologists, Thomas B. Cech and Philip A. Sharp, who made independent fundamental discoveries about the role of RNA in living cells. Each Lasker award includes a $15,000 honorarium. Cech and Sharp share the honorarium for this year’s award in basic medical research. At an award luncheon last month, each winner also received a citation and a statuette of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the foundation’s symbol of man’s victory over premature disability, death, and disease. Methadone Maintenance Dole, professor and senior physician emeritus at Rockefeller University, was honored for his research showing that heroin addiction can be controlled medically with methadone maintenance. In the first hospital studies of heroin addicts, Dole found that methadone prevented the symptoms of withdrawal without sedating the patient or making him feel “high.” Daily administration of methadone at carefully calculated doses maintains the patient in an alert, normal frame of mind, and prevents the recurrent “drug hunger” for heroin. In the 1960s, Dole became interested in the problem of heroin addiction during his daily commutes from Rye, N.Y., through Harlem, to Rockefeller University. He says he was embarrassed by traveling from an affluent area to an “oasis” in New York City, while neglecting the problems of people he passed along the way. Dole says he began to look into narcotic addiction and realized it was “a very rich scientific problem.” Says Dole, “Scientifically, it was sort of an unexplored territory. And one of the instincts you have when you’re in science is to try and find something easy. This seemed to be absolutely the right formula—do just a little bit of research and you’re a pioneer!” As Dole pursued the study of narcotic addiction, he was strongly influenced by the book The Drug Addict As Patient (Grune and Stratton, 1956), by psychiatrist Marie Nyswander, who had determined that neither classical psychoanalysis, group therapy, behavioral modification, nor other psychiatric approaches enabled heroin addicts to break out of the cycle of addiction for more than a few weeks or months at best. Dole recruited Nyswander, and later they were married. They remained partners in research until Nyswander’s death in 1986. Despite Dole’s work, methadone maintenance remains a highly controversial treatment for heroin addiction. Critics say the treatment simply substitutes one addiction for another. Treatment centers have been opposed, methadone patients treated as outcasts. In response to these attitudes, Dole says, “The data certainly are in to prove that methadone is both effective and medically safe. There are patients now that have been maintained continuously for as long as 20 years, and they’re in good health. So the objections, the worries people had at the beginning have now been properly answered.” At a New York City press conference held to announce the awards, two former heroin addicts who broke their addiction through methadone maintenance expressed gratitude for Dole’s work and advocated more national programs. But scientists are still puzzling over questions about addiction, and at the press conference, Dole recognized his basic science counterparts saying, “Ultimately, we as clinicians rely upon basic scientists to give explanations of what we’re finding. Part of my job is to manufacture questions for feilows like that.” ‘Profound Impact’ Regarding such basic scientists as Cech and Sharp, their work has provided pieces of the groundwork of genetic research, allowing others to pursue answers to such questions as what role does genetics play in diseases that include addiction? “Their contributions and the continuing research these contributions have stimulated will have a profound impact on studies of carcinogenesis, growth, healing, aging, and embryonic development,” said Alice Fordyce, executive vice president of the Lasker Foundation and director of the medical research awards program, in announcing the award. “They may also assist in unraveling the mysteries of the H1V virus that causes AIDS and other viruses yet to be discovered.” Sharp discovered that strands of DNA contain seemingly meaningless segments—called introns— which are later spliced out. He found that the introns are copied from DNA to RNA along with meaningful genetic instructions, as part of the normal process of genetic transcription. The introns are then spliced out of RNA before the instructions are translated into proteins. “In 1977,” he recalls, “we discovered that the structure of genes in human cells is very different than we once expected it to be. And in the interim it has become clear that the basis of diseases such as cancer, the basis of diseases such as AIDS, isall part of the expression of genes through this splicing pathway.” Sharp became interested in the structure of genes during the early 1970s, as a young scientist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. In 1974, he moved to MIT, where, as director of the Cancer Research Center and professor of biology, he continues his studies of RNA. While Cech and Sharp never actually collaborated, Cech says that when he was a postdoc at MIT, he dropped by Sharp’s lab now and then to talk about his work. And Cech’s studies actually sprung from Sharp’s gene-splicing discovery. Cech, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, made his award-winning discovery while searching for the enzyme that catalyzes the splicing reaction discovered by Sharp. Instead, he found that RNA can behave as an enzyme itself, in addition to its previously known role of carrying genetic instructions. This finding has led some scientists to speculate that RNA could have played a key role in the origin of life. Cech explains that scientists once thought cells contained two kinds of molecules—information molecules that stored and transferred hereditary information; and functional molecules that could reproduce and modulate cell processes. “The question was, which came first, the information or the function? The nucleic acid or the protein? Now, we’ve found that RNA is every bit as good an informational molecule as DNA and also can be a catalyst—can bind small molecules and facilitate reactions, and do things that were previously thought to be unique to proteins. So, if RNA can do both the information and the function, maybe at the very beginning there was only RNA—and then came proteins.” Public Service In addition to its annual medical awards, the foundation also occasionally presents a public service award. This year, an Albert Lasker Public Service award was presented to Sen. Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. (R-Conn.). In announcing the award, Fordyce said: “Over the past two decades, Sen. Weicker has been a pillar of strength and sup port of increasing the federal fund ing for biomedical research and public health programs. He has been a constant advocate of the wise conviction that a nation is only as strong as the health of its people.” Although Weicker—who failed to gain re-election in last month’s election—couldn’t offer specifics he vowed not to give up his advocacy for these programs. “According to Harry Truman, I get a promotion,” said Weicker with a laugh. “I’m now the boss and the other guys in the Senate work for me. These fights that I’ve fought. they didn’t end last Tuesday Somebody’s got to be in there pitching.”

Lasker Awards Go To Three Scientists And A Senator

The Scientist Staff

Methadone Maintenance

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