Kaelin, Ratcliffe, Semenza win Nobel prize for medicine
Scientists William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to the availability of oxygen, the award-giving body said on Monday.
"The seminal discoveries by this year's Nobel laureates revealed the mechanism for one of life's most essential adaptive processes," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement on awarding the prize of 9 million Swedish crowns ($913,000).
Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievements in science, peace and literature have been awarded since 1901 and were created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
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William G. Kaelin Jr
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2019
Born: 1957, New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD, USA
Prize motivation: "for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability."
Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2019
Born: 1954, Lancashire, United Kingdom
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, Francis Crick Institute, London, United Kingdom
Prize motivation: "for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability."
Gregg L. Semenza
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2019
Born: 1956, New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Prize motivation: "for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability."
So far 109 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have been awarded between 1901 and 2018. Among the winners, 12 are women.
The youngest Medicine Laureate ever, Frederick G. Banting, was awarded the 1923 Medicine Prize for the discovery of insulin at the age of 32. And oldest Medicine Laureate ever, Peyton Rous, was awarded the Medicine Prize in 1966 for his discovery of tumour-inducing viruses at 87.
