Healthcare analytics, AI solutions for biological big data, providing an AI platform for the biotech, life sciences, medical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as for related technological approaches, i.e., curation and text analysis with machine learning and other activities related to AI applications to these industries.
LIVE – 50th Annual Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for work on messenger RNA, modification of Nucleic Acids applied in the development of COVID-19 Vaccines
Article ID #289: LIVE – 50th Annual Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for work on messenger RNA, modification of Nucleic Acids applied in the development of COVID-19 Vaccines. Published on 1/22/2021
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50th Annual Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for work on messenger RNA, modification of Nucleic Acids applied in the development of COVID-19 Vaccines
Rosenstiel Award given to pioneering scientists behind COVID-19 vaccines
This year’s prize for distinguished work in basic medical research was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for work on messenger RNA.
Courtesy Karikó/University of Pennsylvania Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
For those of you who would like to share the recording of this event with others, or those of you who were not able to attend the web event, the recording of the program can be found here:
By engineering a modified version of the messenger RNA (mRNA) inside human cells and then developing a system to deliver it to its target, the two researchers laid the groundwork for the vaccines brought to fruition by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
“This award celebrates how basic research in molecular biology can be the foundation for applications that can affect the lives of us all,” said James Haber, the Abraham and Etta Goodman Professor of Biology and director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center.
“Through their painstaking research into mRNA – and persistence despite setbacks – Weissman and Karikó laid the groundwork for vaccines that will save countless lives.”
Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and 2017 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Michael Rosbash said:
“Among the few positive consequences of the current pandemic are the successful efforts made worldwide to generate effective vaccines. The most creative of these rely on the new messenger RNA technology pioneered by Kariko and Weissman. This is a great story where individual initiative in basic science has ended up having a remarkable real-world impact.”
The Rosenstiel Award has had a distinguished record of identifying and honoring scientists who subsequently have been honored with the Lasker and Nobel Prizes. Thirty-six of 93 Rosenstiel Award winners have subsequently been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology or in Chemistry.
A full list of awardees can be found on the award’s website.
The award will be presented on February 8 at 12 p.m. via webinar.
Karikó and Weissman began working together over 20 years ago when both were at U Penn.
At the time, many scientists didn’t believe mRNA, which transport instructions from DNA to the ribosomes for the production of proteins, could be the basis for a vaccine. In experiments, injecting mRNA into mice caused deadly inflammation.
But Karikó and Weissman pressed on, discovering a method of altering mRNA that enabled it to enter cells without triggering the body’s immune system. They did this by tweaking one of the four nucleosides that are the building blocks of mRNA.
Several years later, Karikó and Weissman devised a method of packaging mRNA inside a lipid nanoparticle — a small bubble of oil — so that the molecule didn’t fall apart as it traveled through the body.
“We basically tested every possible delivery system and found this was the best,” Weissman recently told BrandeisNOW.
The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines work by spurring human cells to produce the spike-shaped protein found on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the illness, and triggering the immune system to produce protective antibodies.
In general, mRNA vaccines have the advantage of being cheaper to produce than traditional vaccines for chickenpox, polio, flu or rabies. It’s also hoped they can be adapted to treat other infectious diseases such as genital herpes (which is caused by the herpes simplex virus), influenza, Zika and HIV.
“The COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough is a great example of how basic science innovations, such as the RNA technology pioneered by Weissman and Karikó, can have an enormous impact on advances in the biomedical sciences,” said biochemist Carol Fierke, the university’s new provost and executive vice president.
In addition to her post at BioNTech, Karikó is an adjunct associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Weissman is also director of vaccine research at the Perelman school’s division of infectious diseases.
LAST PAST 5 Years Recipients
Past Winners
49th (2019)
for their remarkable contributions to our understanding of the sensations of temperature, pain and touch
David Julius Morris Herzstein Chair in Molecular Biology and Medicine Professor and Chair, Department of Physiology School of Medicine The University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA USA
Ardem Patapoutian Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Department of Neuroscience The Scripps Research Institute La Jolla, CA USA
48th (2018)
for his fundamental and far-reaching studies of protein structure using X-ray crystallography
Steven C. Harrison Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Professor of Basic Medical Sciences Harvard Medical School Chief, Division of Molecular Medicine Boston Children’s Hospital Boston, MA USA
for her elucidation of the protection of telomeres and the maintenance of genome stability
Titia de Lange Leon Hess Professor American Cancer Society Research Professor Head, Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics Director, Anderson Center for Cancer Research The Rockefeller University New York, NY USA
in recognition of her pioneering work on the mechanisms of protein folding and the severe consequences of protein misfolding that are manifest in disease
Susan Lindquist (1949-2016) Professor of Biology Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Member, Whitehead Institute Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA USA
Article ID #288: Allon Klein, Harvard Medical School, and Aviv Regev, Genentech, Recipients of National Academy of Sciences James Prize in Science and Technology Integration 2021 Award. Published on 1/19/2021
The National Academy of Sciences will award the inaugural James Prize in Science and Technology Integration to Allon Klein, Harvard Medical School, and Aviv Regev, Genentech Research and Early Development, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They are receiving the $50,000 prize for “their concurrent development of now widely adopted massively parallel single-cell genomics to interrogate the gene expression profiles that define, at the level of individual cells, the distinct cell types in metazoan tissues, their developmental trajectories, and disease states, which integrated tools from molecular biology, engineering, statistics, and computer science.” The James Prize honors outstanding contributions made by researchers who are able to adopt or adapt information or techniques from outside their fields, integrating knowledge from two or more disciplines (e.g., engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, biomedicine, geosciences, astronomy, or computational sciences) to solve a major contemporary challenge not addressable from a single disciplinary perspective.
Klein is recognized for innovating high-throughput experimental and mathematical approaches to analyze single-cell transcriptomes at an unprecedented level of detail and discover how cell fate is decided in metazoan tissues. His work combines statistics and physics with molecular biology. He has mapped differentiation hierarchies, identified transitional developmental states to predict features of fate control, and discovered new cell types and regenerative programs.
Regev is credited with forging new ways to unite the disciplines of biology, computational science, and engineering as a pioneer in the field of single-cell biology, including developing some of its core experimental and analysis tools, and their application to discover cell types, states, programs, environmental responses, development, tissue locations, and regulatory circuits, and deploying these to assemble cellular atlases of the human body that illuminate mechanisms of disease with remarkable fidelity.
The prize, made possible through a generous donation from Robert “Bob” James, will be presented to Klein and Regev virtually during the National Academy of Sciences’ 158th annual meeting.
Awards News
» Stay tuned! The 2021 NAS Awards recipients will be announced on January 21 with the NAS Public Welfare Medal announced on January 25. » In a recent episode of the podcast Clear+Vivid, hosted by 2016 Public Welfare Medalist Alan Alda, Marcia McNutt discusses her framework for delivering science in a crisis and how the National Academies are advising the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click here to listen.
Joe Biden Announced Science Team Nominations for the New Administration
Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD
Article ID #287: Joe Biden Announced Science Team Nominations for the New Administration. Published on 1/17/2021
WordCloud Image Produced by Adam Tubman
In an announcement televised on C-Span, President Elect Joseph Biden announced his new Science Team to advise on science policy matters, as part of the White House Advisory Committee on Science and Technology. Below is a video clip and the transcript, also available at
National Italian American Foundation Honors Dr. Anthony Fauci with Leonardo da Vinci Award for Leadership in Health and Science, SHRO Founder Dr. Antonio Giordano Comments
Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD
Article ID #286: National Italian American Foundation Honors Dr. Anthony Fauci with Leonardo da Vinci Award for Leadership in Health and Science, SHRO Founder Dr. Antonio Giordano Comments. Published on 11/5/2020
2020 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson
Reporter: Aviva Lev- Ari, PhD, RN
Article ID #285: 2020 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson. Published on 10/12/2020
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UPDATED on 10/16/2020
The Nobel Prize for economic sciences this year went to Paul MIlgrom and Robert Wilson. Milgrom is recognized as one of the world’s great experts in auction theory, and I interviewed him for my book In the Plex (finally out in paper next February!) about Google’s clever AdWords approach to bidding, which was crafted by Google engineer Eric Veach along with his boss Salar Kamangar. I’d asked Milgrom to compare the AdWords system to the competitor, Overture:
One fan of Veach’s system was the top auction theorist, Stanford economist Paul Milgrom. “Overture’s auctions were much less successful,” says Milgrom. “In that world, you bid by the slot. If you wanted to be in third position, you put in a bid for third. If there’s an obvious guy to win the first position, nobody would bid against him, and he’d get it cheap. If you wanted to be in every position, you had to make bids for each of them. But Google simplified the auction. Instead of making eight bids for the eight positions, you made one single bid. The competition for second position will automatically raise the price for the first position. So the simplification thickens the market. The effect is that it guarantees that there’s competition for the top positions.”
Veach and Kamangar’s implementation was so impressive that it changed even Milgrom’s way of thinking. “Once I saw this from Google, I began seeing it everywhere,” he says, citing examples in spectrum auctions, diamond markets, and the competition between Kenyan and Rwandan coffee beans. “I’ve begun to realize that Google somehow or other introduced a level of simplification to ad auctions that was not included before.” And it wasn’t just a theoretical advance. “Google immediately started getting higher prices for advertising than Overture was getting,” he notes.
Subject: Clarence Thomas wants to rethink internet speech. Be afraid
Paul Milgrom (left) and Robert Wilson share the 2020 Nobel prize in economic sciences for improvements to auction theory and invention of new auction formats.
Image Credit: Elena Zhukova for the Stanford Graduate School of Business
The 2020 Nobel prize in economic sciences rewards work on an ancient form of transaction that has acquired new complexity and urgency in the modern age: the auction.
Insights in auction theory made by Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, both of Stanford University in California, have found applications ranging from the pricing of government bonds to the licensing of radio-spectrum bands in telecommunications.
Diane Coyle of the University of Cambridge, UK, says that the Nobel, announced on 12 October, will be widely welcomed. “These two not only did foundational work themselves”, she says, “but also inspired cohorts of younger researchers.”
Economist Preston McAfee of Google agrees. “I, and thousands like me, use the fruits of their work on a daily basis to make markets work better — to improve pricing, to manage incentives, to facilitate decision-making, to increase efficiency.”
Their research has intersected with computer science and communications engineering to lay the foundations for many online platforms, Coyle adds.
Economist John Kagel of Ohio State University in Columbus, USA, called it “an outstanding selection”.
Online platforms such as eBay have raised public awareness of some of the complexities of auctions. There are many ways to stage them: for example, in a so-called “English auction” the item on offer simply goes to the highest bidder; whereas in a “Dutch auction” the selling starts from a high price, and bidders submit the price they are willing to pay.
But bidding is affected by many more factors that might reduce the seller’s final profit, cause losses for the winning bidder, create inefficiencies of allocation, or harm the public good. The work of the two laureates has helped to reduce these problems and to suggest new, more efficient ways for auctions to be conducted.
One problem is that different bidders can have different degrees of knowledge about an item for sale. For example, in a property auction, all bidders for a property will have access to some public information such as its resale value. But other kinds of information — such as hidden structural damage — will be private and not known to everyone.
A bidder who does not have such information might end up overpaying if they want to buy the property. They might be able to infer what others know about the value if bids are public – and people start to drop out – but not if bids are private.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Wilson showed what happens to prices and profits in auctions when bidders have different degrees of private information.
Furthermore, if information about a property is highly uncertain — if the nature of the neighbourhood is rapidly changing, say — that could make buyers cautious and reduce the seller’s profit. In the 1980s, Milgrom — a former doctoral student of Wilson’s — developed models (partly in conjunction with Robert Weber of Northwestern University) that showed there is then an incentive for sellers to gather and share expert information with bidders, within different auction formats. The predictions of how such public information helps prevent losses to sellers and increases their revenue have been born out by experiments, says Kagel.
A spectrum of options
Auctions can be more complex when the goods for sale are divisible into parts or batches — for example, when governments sell licenses to companies bidding to operate in energy, telecommunications or transportation markets. One issue for such auctions is that sellers are vulnerable to collusion between buyers to keep the buying price down. Wilson’s work in the 1970s helped to identify these problems and to design new auctions to avoid them, for example in markets for electricity provision.
The sales of items might also be interdependent. A classic example in the 1990s was the sale of radio-frequency bands to telecom companies for mobile-phone networks — which many countries decided was best done through auctions.
If rights to frequency bands were simply auctioned region by region, a national telecoms company couldn’t be sure of acquiring the same frequency everywhere. And the value to them for one region would depend on whether they could buy the same frequency band elsewhere. The resulting patchwork of coverage would be inconvenient for users too.
To tackle such problems, Milgrom and Wilson (and independently, McAfee) devised the simultaneous multiple-round auction (SMRA). Here, bidders can place bids over several rounds of bidding. This gives them a chance to glean something about others’ private information while bidding, creating fairer and more efficient outcomes.
This approach was used in 1994 for auctioning telecom licenses in the United States, and has been adopted in Canada, India, and several European and Scandinavian countries. Milgrom has also devised other formats that ease some of the shortcomings of the SMRA.
“Unlike many theoreticians, Wilson and Milgrom brought their work to the real world, and transformed government policies toward auctions around the world,” says McAfee.
“There was no question that these two would win the Nobel prize at some point,” says economist Paul Klemperer of the University of Oxford. “It could have happened at any time in the past 20 years.”
“One could even imagine Paul Milgrom having a second Nobel prize,” he adds, for his work in information economics and industrial organization. Milgrom has given a Nobel acceptance speech before: in 1996, as a stand-in for William Vickery, who died three days after the announcement of his prize for laying the foundations of auction theory in the 1960s.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2020 was awarded jointly to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.”
Prize announcement
Announcement of the 2020 Prize in Economic Sciences by Professor Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on 12 October 2020.
“This prize is about avoiding the winner’s curse”
Immediately after the announcement, Tommy Andersson, member of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, was interviewed by freelance journalist Joanna Rose regarding the 2020 Prize in Economic Sciences.
Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2020
“for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”
Their theoretical discoveries have improved auctions in practice
This year’s Laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, have studied how auctions work. They have also used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a traditional way, such as radio frequencies. Their discoveries have benefitted sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world.
People have always sold things to the highest bidder, or bought them from whoever makes the cheapest offer. Nowadays, objects worth astronomical sums of money change hands every day in auctions, not only household objects, art and antiquities, but also securities, minerals and energy. Public procurements can also be conducted as auctions.
Using auction theory, researchers try to understand the outcomes of different rules for bidding and final prices, the auction format. The analysis is difficult, because bidders behave strategically, based on the available information. They take into consideration both what they know themselves and what they believe other bidders to know.
Robert Wilson developed the theory for auctions of objects with a common value – a value which is uncertain beforehand but, in the end, is the same for everyone. Examples include the future value of radio frequencies or the volume of minerals in a particular area. Wilson showed why rational bidders tend to place bids below their own best estimate of the common value: they are worried about the winner’s curse – that is, about paying too much and losing out.
Paul Milgrom formulated a more general theory of auctions that not only allows common values, but also private values that vary from bidder to bidder. He analysed the bidding strategies in a number of well-known auction formats, demonstrating that a format will give the seller higher expected revenue when bidders learn more about each other’s estimated values during bidding.
Over time, societies have allocated ever more complex objects among users, such as landing slots and radio frequencies. In response, Milgrom and Wilson invented new formats for auctioning off many interrelated objects simultaneously, on behalf of a seller motivated by broad societal benefit rather than maximal revenue. In 1994, the US authorities first used one of their auction formats to sell radio frequencies to telecom operators. Since then, many other countries have followed suit.
“This year’s Laureates in Economic Sciences started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally. Their discoveries are of great benefit to society,” says Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Prize Committee.
Paul R. Milgrom, born 1948 in Detroit, USA. Ph.D. 1979 from Stanford University, Stanford, USA. Shirley and Leonard Ely Jr. Professor of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University, USA.
Robert B. Wilson, born 1937 in Geneva, USA. D.B.A. 1963 from Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, Stanford University, USA.
The Prize amount: 10 million Swedish kronor, to be shared equally between the Laureates. Further information: www.kva.se and http://www.nobelprize.org Press contact: Eva Nevelius, Press Secretary, +46 70 878 67 63, eva.nevelius@kva.se Experts: Tommy Andersson, +46 73 358 26 54, tommy.andersson@nek.lu.se, Tore Ellingsen, +46 70 796 10 49, tore.ellingsen@hhs.se, Torsten Persson, +46 79 313 39 04, torsten.persson@iies.su.se, Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
The University of California has a proud legacy of winning Nobel Prizes, 68 faculty and staff have been awarded 69 Nobel Prizes.
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Article ID #284: The University of California has a proud legacy of winning Nobel Prizes, 68 faculty and staff have been awarded 69 Nobel Prizes. Published on 10/11/2020
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PREVIOUS PRIZE WINNERS
The University of California has a proud legacy of winning Nobel Prizes that stretches all the way back to 1939, when Ernest O. Lawrence was awarded the prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron. In the years since, dozens of other University of California faculty and staff have been awarded this highest international honor for their contributions in medicine, economics, physics and more.
Today, 68 faculty and staff have been awarded 69 Nobel Prizes.
View as grid
Name
Campus affiliation
Field of study
Year of award
Jennifer Doudna
UC Berkeley
Chemistry
2020
Andrea Ghez
UCLA
Physics
2020
Reinhard Genzel
UC Berkeley
Physics
2020
Randy Schekman
UC Berkeley
Physiology or medicine
2013
Lloyd Shapley
UCLA
Economics
2012
Shinya Yamanaka
UC San Francisco
Physiology or medicine
2012
Saul Perlmutter
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
2011
Elizabeth Blackburn
UC San Francisco
Physiology or medicine
2009
Oliver E. Williamson
UC Berkeley
Economics
2009
Roger Y. Tsien
UC San Diego
Chemistry
2008
George Smoot
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
2006
Richard R. Schrock
UC Riverside
Chemistry
2005
David Gross
UC Santa Barbara
Physics
2004
Finn E. Kydland
UC Santa Barbara
Economic sciences
2004
Irwin Rose
UC Irvine
Chemistry
2004
Robert F. Engle
UC San Diego
Economic sciences
2003
Clive Granger
UC San Diego
Economic sciences
2003
Sydney Brenner
UC San Diego
Physiology or medicine
2002
George Akerlof
UC Berkeley
Economic sciences
2001
Alan J. Heeger
UC Santa Barbara
Chemistry
2000
Herbert Kroemer
UC Santa Barbara
Physics
2000
Daniel McFadden
UC Berkeley
Economic sciences
2000
Louis J. Ignarro
UCLA
Physiology or medicine
1998
Walter Kohn
UC Santa Barbara
Chemistry
1998
Robert B. Laughlin
UC Livermore Lab
Physics
1998
Paul D. Boyer
UCLA
Chemistry
1997
Steven Chu
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
1997
Stanley B. Prusiner
UC San Francisco
Physiology or medicine
1997
Paul Crutzen
UC San Diego
Chemistry
1995
Mario J. Molina
UC San Diego
Chemistry
1995
Frederick Reines
UC Irvine
Physics
1995
F. Sherwood Rowland
UC Irvine
Chemistry
1995
John Harsanyi
UC Berkeley
Economic sciences
1994
Harry Markowitz
UC San Diego
Economic sciences
1990
J. Michael Bishop
UC San Francisco
Physiology or medicine
1989
Harold E. Varmus
UC San Francisco
Physiology or medicine
1989
Donald J. Cram
UCLA
Chemistry
1987
Yuan T. Lee
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Chemistry
1986
Gerard Debreu
UC Berkeley
Economic sciences
1983
Czeslaw Milosz
UC Berkeley
Literature
1980
Roger Guillemin
UC San Diego
Physiology or medicine
1977
Renato Dulbecco
UC San Diego
Physiology or medicine
1975
George Emil Palade
UC San Diego
Physiology or medicine
1974
John Robert Schrieffer
UC Santa Barbara
Physics
1972
Hannes Alfven
UC San Diego
Physics
1970
Luis Walter Alvarez
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
1968
Robert W. Holley
UC San Diego
Physiology or medicine
1968
Julian Schwinger
UCLA
Physics
1965
Charles H. Townes
UC Berkeley
Physics
1964
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
UC San Diego
Physics
1963
Francis Crick
UC San Diego
Physiology or medicine
1962
Melvin Calvin
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Chemistry
1961
Donald A. Glaser
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
1960
Willard Libby
UCLA
Chemistry
1960
Owen Chamberlain
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
1959
Emilio Segrè
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Chemistry
1959
Linus Pauling
UC San Diego
Chemistry, Peace
1954, 1962
Edwin McMillan
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Chemistry
1951
Glenn T. Seaborg
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Chemistry
1951
William Giauque
UC Berkeley
Chemistry
1949
John Howard Northrop
UC Berkeley
Chemistry
1946
Wendell Meredith Stanley
UC Berkeley
Chemistry
1946
Ernest Lawrence
UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab
Physics
1939
Harold Urey
UC San Diego
Chemistry
1934
HOW UC NOBEL LAUREATES ARE COUNTED
Our list of Nobel Prize winners includes University of California faculty and staff who were affiliated with UC when they received their award. It also includes faculty and staff who joined UC after receiving their Nobel Prize. And although we are immensely proud of the many UC alumni who have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes, they are not counted here. Nor are visiting scholars or others who had short-term assignments with UC. Finally, our Nobelist list is a “lifetime” list and includes those living, retired or deceased.
Genetic scissors: a tool for rewriting the code of life
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have discovered one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using these, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. This technology has had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, is contributing to new cancer therapies and may make the dream of curing inherited diseases come true.
Researchers need to modify genes in cells if they are to find out about life’s inner workings. This used to be time-consuming, difficult and sometimes impossible work. Using the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors, it is now possible to change the code of life over the course of a few weeks.
“There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all. It has not only revolutionised basic science, but also resulted in innovative crops and will lead to ground-breaking new medical treatments,” says Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
As so often in science, the discovery of these genetic scissors was unexpected. During Emmanuelle Charpentier’s studies of Streptococcus pyogenes, one of the bacteria that cause the most harm to humanity, she discovered a previously unknown molecule, tracrRNA. Her work showed that tracrRNA is part of bacteria’s ancient immune system, CRISPR/Cas, that disarms viruses by cleaving their DNA.
Charpentier published her discovery in 2011. The same year, she initiated a collaboration with Jennifer Doudna, an experienced biochemist with vast knowledge of RNA. Together, they succeeded in recreating the bacteria’s genetic scissors in a test tube and simplifying the scissors’ molecular components so they were easier to use.
In an epoch-making experiment, they then reprogrammed the genetic scissors. In their natural form, the scissors recognise DNA from viruses, but Charpentier and Doudna proved that they could be controlled so that they can cut any DNA molecule at a predetermined site. Where the DNA is cut it is then easy to rewrite the code of life.
Since Charpentier and Doudna discovered the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors in 2012 their use has exploded. This tool has contributed to many important discoveries in basic research, and plant researchers have been able to develop crops that withstand mould, pests and drought. In medicine, clinical trials of new cancer therapies are underway, and the dream of being able to cure inherited diseases is about to come true. These genetic scissors have taken the life sciences into a new epoch and, in many ways, are bringing the greatest benefit to humankind.
Emmanuelle Charpentier, born 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France. Ph.D. 1995 from Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Berlin, Germany.
Jennifer A. Doudna, born 1964 in Washington, D.C, USA. Ph.D. 1989 from Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Other Articles on the Nobel Prize in this Open Access Journal Include:
2020 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for Hepatitis C Discovery goes to British scientist Michael Houghton and US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Article ID #282: 2020 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for Hepatitis C Discovery goes to British scientist Michael Houghton and US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice. Published on 10/5/2020
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 was awarded jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice “for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus.”
Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to Hepatitis C discovery
By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent
The winners are British scientist Michael Houghton and US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice.
The Nobel Prize committee said their discoveries ultimately “saved millions of lives”. The virus is a common cause of liver cancer and a major reason why people need a liver transplant.
In the 1960s, there was huge concern that people receiving donated blood were getting chronic hepatitis (liver inflammation) from an unknown, mysterious disease. The Nobel Prize committee said a blood transfusion at the time was like “Russian roulette”. Highly sensitive blood tests mean such cases have now been eliminated in many parts of the world, and effective anti-viral drugs have also been developed. “For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating Hepatitis C virus from the world,” the prize committee said. However, the 70 million people are currently living with the virus, which still kills around 400,000 a year.
The mystery killer
The viruses Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B had been discovered by the mid-1960s.
But Prof Harvey Alter, while studying transfusion patients at the US National Institutes of Health in 1972, showed there was another, mystery, infection at work. Patients were still getting sick after receiving donated blood. He showed that giving blood from infected patients to chimpanzees led to them developing the disease.
The mysterious illness became known as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis in and the hunt was now on.
Prof Michael Houghton, while at the pharmaceutical firm Chiron, managed to isolated the genetic sequence of the virus in 1989. This showed it was a type of flavivirus and it was named Hepatitis C.
And Prof Charles Rice, while at Washington University in St. Louis, applied the finishing touches in 1997. He injected a genetically engineered Hepatitis C virus into the liver of chimpanzees and showed this could lead to hepatitis.
Article ID #281: 2020 AAAI US$1M Annual Award for Societal Impact of Artificial Intelligence goes to MIT’s CSAIL Professor, Regina Barzilay. Published 9/23/2020
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“The model learns to make subjective assessments without the bias of human labeling for training, but with some guidance and therefore not completely unsupervised learning,” she said.
The software was assessed in a reader study using a set of 792 screening mammograms that included many challenging borderline samples and came from three institutions, two continents, and three vendors, according to Watanabe. The seven radiologists in the reader study had spent at least 75% of their time reading mammograms for the last three years and read more than 5,000 mammograms each year.
The readers had significant inter-reader variability in their density assessments, producing a kappa of 0.35 for the specific BI-RADS A-D category assessments, as well as a kappa of 0.6 in the less-challenging binary classification of dense versus nondense breast tissue, according to Watanabe.
The AI software also demonstrated a level of agreement with the reader results that correlated with the degree of reader consensus.
“In cases where there was 100% reader agreement, cmDensity was near perfect and was perfect for four-class and two-class assessments, respectively, with kappas of 0.97 and 1.0,” she said.
The few outlier assessments for the specific BI-RADS categories were off by just one BI-RADS class, Watanabe said.
The software was also superior in terms of intra-reader variability, yielding an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.99, compared with an ICC range of 0.70 to 0.82 for the radiologists, according to the researchers.
Barzilay’s work in AI, which ranges from tools for early cancer detection to platforms to identify new antibiotics, is increasingly garnering recognition: On Wednesday, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence named Barzilay as the inaugural recipient of a new annual award honoring an individual developing or promoting AI for the good of society. The award comes with a $1 million prize sponsored by the Chinese education technology company Squirrel AI Learning.
Barzilay’s treatment was successful, and she believes her clinical team at MGH did the best they could in providing her with standard care. At the same time, she said, “it was extremely not satisfying to see how the simplest things that the technology can address were not addressed” — including a delayed diagnosis, an inability to collect data, and statistical flaws in studies used to make treatment decisions.
AAAI and Squirrel AI Learning Announce the Establishment of US$1M Annual Award for Societal Impact of Artificial Intelligence
May 28, 2019 Beijing, China
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Squirrel AI Learning announced the establishment of a new $1M annual award for societal benefits of AI. The award will be sponsored by Squirrel AI Learning as part of its mission to promote the use of artificial intelligence with lasting positive effects for society.
The new Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence to Benefit Humanity was announced jointly by Derek Haoyang Li, Founder and Chairman of Squirrel AI Learning, and Yolanda Gil, President of AAAI, at the 2019 conference for AI for adaptive Education (AIAED) in Beijing.
Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs: Podcast by Denise Silber spoke with Moderna CEO and Harvard alumnus Stéphane Bancel: The race to find a vaccine – what it takes to develop a vaccine during a pandemic, Leadership in managing a science-based company
Reporter: Aviva Lev- Ari, PhD, RN
Article ID #280: Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs: Podcast by Denise Silber spoke with Moderna CEO and Harvard alumnus Stéphane Bancel: The race to find a vaccine – what it takes to develop a vaccine during a pandemic, Leadership in managing a science-based company. Published on 7/15/2020
WordCloud Image Produced by Adam Tubman
WHEN A HARVARD ALUM IS THE CEO OF MODERNA THERAPEUTICS, IN THE RACE FOR THE COVID-19 VACCINE
In this episode, Denise Silber, host of HAE Invites, interviews the CEO of Moderna Therapeutics (MRNA), one of the most strategic and observed life science companies of the COVID crisis. In December 2018, Moderna became the largest biotech IPO in history. Now in 2020, they are called upon to do what has never been done before, to accelerate the development of a vaccine for a new disease. Join Denise as she speaks with Stéphane Bancel, the founding CEO of this Cambridge, MA research-based firm, whose pioneering messenger RNA (mRNA) technology platform, includes a leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
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HERE’S A GLIMPSE OF WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
Where Moderna Therapeutics is in the process of bringing the vaccine to market and who their competitors are
How the population could be segmented for the distribution of the vaccine
Current thinking on the need of a booster to prolong immunity
How Messenger RNA technology can be a platform for producing vaccines and medicines in an accelerated time frame
The importance of asking “what if”, making decisions with incomplete information, and being transparent when managing in a science-based company
How to empower a team to do what has never been done before, through boldness, curiosity, and collaboration
How to share and communicate common values as the company grows
Why scientific failure is such a valuable experience
How the Case Method at HBS helps us overcome our blind spots
Stéphane Bancel has served as CEO of Moderna Therapeutics since October 2011 and as a member of Moderna’s board of directors since March 2011. Before joining the Company, he served for five years as Chief Executive Officer of the French diagnostics company bioMérieux SA. From July 2000 to March 2006, Stéphane Bancel served in various roles at Eli Lilly and Company, including as Managing Director, Belgium and as Executive Director, Global Manufacturing Strategy and Supply Chain. Prior to Lilly, he served as Asia-Pacific Sales and Marketing Director for bioMérieux.
Stéphane Bancel currently serves on the board of directors of Qiagen N.V. and previously served on the board of directors of BG Medicine, Inc. and Syros Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYRS). He is currently a Venture Partner at Flagship Pioneering and a trustee of the Museum of Science in Boston. Stéphane Bancel holds a Master of Engineering degree from École Centrale Paris (ECP), a Master of Science in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Courtesy Karikó/University of Pennsylvania Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
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