M A I N   N E W S

Medicine Nobel for 2 Britons, American

Stockholm, October 7
Sydney Brenner and Sir John Sulston of the UK and Robert Horvitz of the USA won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Medicine today for work on how genes regulate organ development and cell death.

The three share the $ one million prize for seminal discoveries into how genes affect organs and the death of cells, shedding new light on the development of many diseases, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in its citation.

Programmed cell death — or “cell suicide” — is a natural process in which billions of cells die every day while a similar number of new ones are created to allow the body and its organs to develop. Brenner, born in South Africa in 1927, Sulston, born in 1942, and Horvitz, born in 1947, worked on roundworms to look into how genes control animal development and behaviour. Reuters

Sir John Sulston

Sydney Brenner