Seven To Receive 1992 Gairdner Awards

Seven scientists, several of whom have made significant contributions to the understanding of cellular and genetic activity, have been named as recipients of this year's Gairdner Foundation International Awards for excellence in medical science. The award ceremony will take place in Toronto on October 23; the winners will divide the foundation's largess, which totals $220,000 Canadian.Throughout its 35-year existence, the Willowdale, Ontario-based foundation has honored 225 scientists from 12 countries that span four continents. This year's winners are two scientists from Canada, two from England, and three from the United States. Since the Gairdner Foundation started presenting its medical science awards in 1957, 39 of the winners have subsequently received a Nobel Prize. Previous Gairdner Award recipients who have gone on to win the Nobel include biologist Julius Axelrod, chemist Thomas Cech, biologist David Baltimore, DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick, Vanderbilt University biochemist Stanley Cohen, and microbiologist Harold Varmus.A prize of $30,000 will be granted to each of this year's winners, with the exception of John R. Evans, who will receive the $40,000 Gairdner Foundation Wightman Award. Evans, chairman of Allelix Biopharmaceuticals Inc. in Mississauga, Ontario, will be honored with the special award as someone who, according to the foundation, "has shown outstanding leadership in Canadian medicine and medical science." Evans describes the sensation of finding out that he had won the award as "a pleasant feeling that things you have done are regarded well by others."Despite the Gairdner Award's Nobel Prize-predicting reputation, Evans does not think he qualifies for a Nobel. "The Wightman Award is about contributions on a broader scale, not just on a level of individual scientific achievement," he says. "It's about the fostering of other people's development and other people's achievements."Evans's personal accomplishments, however, have been highly regarded. During the early 1960s, he and his colleagues explored the role of fatty acid in myocardial metabolism. Evans's group produced a series of highly cited papers; one of the most notable was published in 1963 (J.R. Evans, et al., American Journal of Physiology, 205:766). On the whole, Evans's career has been a consistent jump from one leadership position to the next: He became a founding dean of the faculty of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton (1965-72), after which he became president of the University of Toronto (1972-78), then founding director of the Department of Population, Health, and Nutrition of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. (1979-83), chairman of the board of trustees at the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation in 1979, and then chairman and CEO of Allelix in 1983, a position he still holds."If nothing " he says, "this award is saying, `Hey, this guy can really hold down a job.' "Bert Vogelstein, a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says, like Evans, that winning the Gairdner Award for his research on the genetic basis for cancer will probably not result in a Nobel, but he appreciates the professional approval it represents.A faculty member of Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins since 1978, Vogelstein has been involved with research designed to identify the series of genes linked with the progression of cancer, specifically colon cancer. Vogelstein's articles on the isolation of one commonly mutated gene, p53, have earned him the ranking of eighth most cited scientist in the world, according to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia's Science Citation Index (SCI). A paper in the June 1, 1990, issue of Cell (61[5]:759-67) has become one of the most respected clinical papers published in the last several years, according to David Pendlebury, editor of Science Watch, published by ISI."I view the award," says Vogelstein, "as a welcome recognition that my peers think highly of the work in our lab, but it will not alter the game plan. We will still try and learn as much about cancer as we can."Robert A. Weinberg, another cancer researcher who will receive a Gairdner Award next month, shares Vogelstein's attitude. "I am one of a large group of people in the oncogene field. I don't think this crowns me as anything but what I am," says Weinberg, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Weinberg was honored, in part, for his 1982 identification of an oncogene called ras, which is frequently mutated in bladder cancer. For the past five years, Weinberg has focused his research on tumor suppressor genes, heritable genes that cause cancer when mutated. An example of a cancer caused by a mutated tumor suppressor gene is retinoblastoma, a carcinoma of the retina. Science Watch lists an article by Weinberg entitled "Oncogenes, antioncogenes, and the molecular basis of multistep carcinogenesis" from Cancer Research (49[14]:3713-21, 1989) as one of the most widely cited papers in biomedicine during the fall of 1991. Overall, Weinberg has become the 12th most cited scientist in the world, according to Science Watch (3[6]:3-4, 1992). He received two degrees from MIT, a bachelor's in 1964 and a Ph.D. in biology in 1969. Weinberg then performed research at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., before returning to MIT to take a position as a faculty member in 1973. Japanese native Yoshio Masui, a professor of zoology at the University of Toronto, was honored by the foundation for contributions in the field of cell cycle regulation.In the early 1970s, Masui discovered two important proteins involved in the maturation of frog eggs, MPF (maturation-promoting factor), which stimulates cell division, and CSF (cytostatic factor), which halts cell division (Y. Masui, C.L. Markert, Journal of Experimental Zoology, 177:129-45, 1971). Both of these substances, Masui determined, also contribute heavily to the overall control not only of eggs, but also of various types of cells around the body.Masui says his work in molecular biology, for which he received the award, is finished and is "like a balloon that left my hand and is now out of reach." Masui says he has now moved on to other investigations that focus on more specific questions of cell division. "For example," says Masui, "why do some cells divide every 30 minutes, and other cells every three hours?"Masui received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Kyoto, Japan, in 1961. He taught at Yale University for three years until 1969, when he joined the faculty in Toronto.Award winner Leland H. Hartwell is also performing research in cell biology. Hartwell is a genetics professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work centers on encoding genes in yeast cells to identify specific stages of basic cell cycle regulation. His recent work is focused on determining what dependency relationships exist among individual cell cycle functions. Hartwell's best-known paper, as indicated in SCI, has garnered more than 500 citations ("Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle," Bacteriological Reviews, 38[2]:164-98, 1974).Hartwell, who received his Ph.D. from MIT, spent a year, 1964-65, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, then became an associate professor at the University of California until 1968, when he moved to the University of Washington. Paul M. Nurse, like Hartwell, uses the yeast cell as a diagnostic model in his research on cell cycle regulation. Nurse is a professor of biochemistry at the University of Oxford, England. His award-winning scientific contribution was the identification of cdc2, an important gene in the yeast cell's division activities. His work contributed to the discovery of this gene's human equivalent, p34 protein kinase, which is instrumental in turning cell division on and off.Nurse's paper "Universal control mechanism regulating the onset of M-phase" (Nature, 344:503-8, 1990) has been ranked among the top 10 cited papers in the biological sciences published within the last few years (Science Watch, 3[6]:7, 1992).Nurse says he is going to split the $30,000 prize money on two things: helping his junior colleagues with their research and travel expenses and to buy himself a brand new motorcycle.He has spent his entire career in the United Kingdom, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Angria in Norfolk, and then working at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Suffix, and the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation in London. The Gairdner Award citation honoring Richard Peto, a cancer researcher at the University of Oxford, mentions his "contributions to the design and analysis of clinical trials."But Peto says his team at the Imperial Council Research Fund at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary, was not doing something profoundly complicated or shocking."When my 15-year-old son was looking at the lab's results and said, `Dad, I don't mean to be rude, but isn't what you are doing quite obvious?' then I knew we were doing something not totally unique, but whose time had come," he says. Peto invented the Peto long-rank table survival method for measuring the positive results of randomized trials. This new statistical approach of using unusually large randomized samples has been helpful in showing the effectiveness of both prevention and treatment techniques in disabilities caused by heart disease, cancer, and stroke (Lancet, 335:827-38, 1990)."Until now, people doing clinical trials were not thinking big enough," he contends. "Right now, we are investigating the evolution of deaths caused by smoking in China. Our sample is over 1 million people." Peto has a master's degree from the University of London, where he studied with well-known statistician David Cox. He then began work with medical professor Richard Doll, also a Gairdner Award winner, at Oxford. Peto is still working with him 25 years later.

Seven To Receive 1992 Gairdner Awards

The award ceremony will take place in Toronto on October 23; the winners will divide the foundation's largess, which totals $220,000 Canadian.

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