Lasker Winners Announced

William Kaelin of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School; Peter Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford and Francis Crick Institute, both in the U.K.; and Gregg Semenza of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, have won the 2016 Lasker Award for basic medical research. The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation is honoring the researchers’ independent efforts to understand how cells sense and respond to oxygen availability. The scientists’ findings are now being applied to a variety of drug discovery efforts aimed at treating cancer, anemia, and other diseases. “It’s good to receive the award for basic research because that’s what it [this pathway] is: a fundamental piece of animal physiology,” Ratcliffe told reporters during a press briefing today (September 13). (See “Alive via Autophagy,” The Scientist, March 2010; “Sending Out a Hypoxia SOS,” The Scientist, November 2004; “Discovering HIF Regulation,” The Scientist, April 2003; “Seeking ...