March 1, 2002
Researcher receives Inaugural Wiley Prize for biomedical sciences
S. Korsmeyer, MD
Stanley J. Korsmeyer, MD, a researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), is a co-winner of the inaugural Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences. Korsmeyer is being honored with H. Robert Horvitz, PhD, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Wiley Foundation established the Wiley Prize to recognize scientists who have opened new fields of research or advanced novel concepts and their applications in biomedicine. The Wiley Foundation is the charitable arm of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., a publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals.
Korsmeyer is being honored for his discovery of the relationship between human lymphomas and apoptosis, or programmed cell death, the fundamental process by which cells are programmed to die at the end of their normal life cycle. Apoptosis is necessary for the normal development and function of the body. Korsmeyer's experiments showed that cancer can develop when cancer-causing "oncogenes" block apoptosis and allow cells to grow in an uncontrolled and chaotic fashion.
"It's a tremendous honor to receive this recognition and especially to share it with my much-admired colleague, Bob Horvitz," says Korsmeyer, who is the director of the Program in Molecular Oncology at DFCI. "I commend the Wiley Foundation for taking this initiative, which emphasizes the importance of biomedical research to the public. We all hope that insights into the process of cell death will lead to therapies that benefit so many human diseases characterized by disordered apoptosis."
Korsmeyer earned his medical degree at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and continued on to postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health. After working at the National Cancer Institute and the Washington University School of Medicine, Korsmeyer joined DFCI in 1998 as director of the Program in Molecular Oncology and a Sidney Farber Professor of Pathology. Korsmeyer is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
"These pioneering researchers were chosen for their work in defining the genetic and molecular basis of programmed cell death. Their findings may lead to understanding the molecular basis of human development and the development of many diseases, especially cancer," says Günter Blobel, MD, PhD, chairman of the Wiley Prize awards jury, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Professor of Cell Biology at Rockefeller University.
Korsmeyer and Horvitz will receive a $25,000 grant and are invited to present a lecture at the Rockefeller University in New York City in April.
