American, two Britons win Nobel Prize for gene work

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- An American and two Britons won this year's Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discoveries about how genes regulate organ growth and a process of programmed cell suicide. Their findings shed light on the development of many illnesses, including AIDS and strokes.

Britons Sydney Brenner, 75, and John E. Sulston, 60, and American H. Robert Horvitz, 55, shared the prize, worth about $1 million.

Working with tiny worms, the laureates identified key genes regulating organ development and programmed cell death, a necessary process for pruning excess cells. Many cancer treatment strategies are now aimed at stimulating the cell-death process to kill cancerous cells.

Brenner, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, Calif., is also the founder of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. He showed that the tiny transparent worm C. elegans was useful for studying how cells specialize and organs develop.

Sulston, who is retired from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, discovered that certain cells in the developing worm are destined to die through programmed cell death.

Horvitz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, identified the first two "death genes" in the worms and showed that humans have a gene similar to one of them, the awards committee said.

The award for medicine opened a week of Nobel Prizes that culminates Friday with the prestigious peace prize, the only one revealed in Oslo, Norway.

The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry and economics awards Wednesday in the Swedish capital.

As in years past, the date for the literature prize has not been set. But it always falls on a Thursday, usually the same week as the other awards.

The award committees make their decisions in deep secrecy and candidates are not publicly revealed for 50 years.