Stanley Prusiner
Stanley Ben Prusiner (born May 28, 1942 in Des Moines , Iowa ) is an American biochemist and neurologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for the discovery of prions , a novel class of pathogens .
In 1992 he and Detlev Riesner received the Max Planck Research Award , in 1993 a Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Richard Lounsbery Award . In 1994 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research . In 1995 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize and the Pasarow Award , the Keio Medical Science Prize in 1996 , the Prix Charles-Léopold Mayer in 1997, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize and the Zülch Prize . In 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Scienceawarded in the United States. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1992), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993) and the American Philosophical Society (1998) as well as a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Royal Society .
Prusiner studied chemistry and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania . His first clinical work as a doctor took him to the University of California, San Francisco in 1968 . He to interrupt the local activities for three years in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda (Maryland) on Escherichia coli to investigate. He then continued his neurological training in San Francisco. Since 1974 Prusiner has been Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1976 he received a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellowship ).
Since 1983 Prusiner has also taught virology at the University of California, Berkeley , where he was also active in Alzheimer's research, and since 1988 also biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.
The importance of Prusiner's research (discovery of the prions he named) lies in attempts to clarify the causes of a number of rarely related infectious and hereditary diseases, the prion diseases. These include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (including the new variant vCJD), Kuru , fatal familial insomnia , Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker syndrome , BSE and scrapie . Based on the research he began in 1972, Prusiner postulated the importance of prions as early as 1982, but initially received neither hearing nor attention. It took more than ten years for his opinion to gain acceptance in the professional world.
literature
- Gisela Baumgart: Prusiner, Stanely Ben. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1188.
Web links
- Short biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1997 award to Stanley Prusiner
Individual evidence
- ^ Stanley B. Prusiner, ER Stadtman: The Enzymes of Glutamine Metabolism. In: National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. New York 1972.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Prusiner, Stanley |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Prusiner, Stanley Ben (full name); Prusiner, Stanley B. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American biochemist, neurologist, Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1942 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Des Moines , USA |