The winners of this year’s Lasker Awards are C. David Allis of Rockefeller University and Michael Grunstein of the University of California, Los Angeles, for discoveries about the proteins that package DNA; John “Iain” Glen, formerly a pharmaceutical researcher at AstraZeneca, for developing the drug propofol; and Yale University’s Joan Steitz for leadership and research throughout her career, the Lasker Foundation announced today (September 11). The Laskers, prestigious awards often used to forecast future Nobel Prize winners, each come with a cash prize of $250,000.
At one time, Grunstein recalled in a teleconference with the media today, most researchers assumed that because the histone proteins that package DNA are highly conserved among vastly different species, they must not be very interesting. But in the 1980s, “we found that they’re very important, not only as packing material, but as proteins that regulate gene activity,” he says.
Allis and colleagues would later ...
