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  Presentation Speech by Professor Ralf F. Pettersson of the Nobel Committee at , December 10, 1997. Translation of the Swedish text. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of prions – a new biological principle…

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2004   The olfactory system The olfactory epithelium contains millions of olfactory neurons, which send messages directly to the olfactory bulb of the brain. The olfactory receptor cells are the only neurons in the nervous system exposed directly to the external environment. Contents: | | | |  | …

 PrPc   The prion protein exists in two forms. The normal, innocuous protein (PrPc) can change its shape to a harmful, disease-causing form (PrPSc). The conversion from PrPc to PrPSc then proceeds via a chain-reaction. When enough PrPSc proteins have been made they form long filamentous aggregates that gradually damage neuronal tissue. The harmful PrPSc…

No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.

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Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk was born on October 30, 1895, at Lagow, a beautiful, small town in the Brandenburg Marches. Until he was fourteen he went to school in Sommerfeld, where his father was assistant headmaster. His mother, Martha Reimer, came from farming stock in the Marches, where she lived in Sommerfeld until 1945 when…

Joshua Lederberg was born in Montclair, N.J. on May 23, 1925. He was brought up in the Washington Heights District of Upper Manhattan, New York City, where he received his education in Public School 46, Junior High School 164 and Stuyvesant High School. From 1941 to 1944 he studied at Columbia College, where he obtained…

Jacques Lucien Monod was born in Paris on February 9th, 1910. In 1917 his parents settled in the South of France, where Monod spent his early years, and he therefore thinks of himself as a Southerner rather than as a Parisian. His father was a painter, something of an unusual vocation for a Huguenot family…

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