Two Americans, Swede Share Nobel Medicine Prize
By Jonathan Lynn
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swede and two Americans won=
the
2000 Nobel prize for medicine Monday for studies on how
messages move around the nervous system, making it possible to
develop drugs against Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.
Arvid Carl=
sson of Sweden and Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel
of the United States share the first Nobel prize of the
millennium, worth nearly $1 million, for their discoveries,
Sweden's Karolinska institute said.
``These discoveries have been cruci=
al for an understanding
of the normal function of the brain and how disturbances in
this signal transduction can give rise to neurological and
psychiatric diseases,'' the institute said.
Messages between nerve cell=
s in the brain, which number
more than 100 billion, are carried by chemical transmitters,
with messages transmitted at special points of contact between
the cells called synapses.
One of these chemical messengers is a hormon=
e-like
substance called dopamine, which when present in certain
quantities allows the brain to function normally.
Carlsson, 77, former =
professor of pharmacology at the
University of Gothenburg, is rewarded for his pioneering
studies going back to the 1950s that dopamine is an important
transmitter in the brain, the institute said.
His research led to the r=
ealization that Parkinson's
disease, in which the victim loses control of body movements,
is caused by a lack of dopamine in certain parts of the brain
and that an efficient remedy, called L-dopa, could be
developed.
Carlsson, the first Swedish Nobel laureate since 1982, made
several other discoveries further clarifying the role of
dopamine in the brain, showing how drugs that can be used to
treat schizophrenia work.
'Magical' Work Easing Suff=
ering Of Millions
Ralf Pettersson, chairman of the Karolinsk=
a institute's
Nobel committee, hailed Carlsson's work as 'magical', relieving
the suffering of millions.
``Parkinson's used to be a disease of which =
people would
die, a horrible death, often by suffocation,'' Pettersson said.
``There=
are millions of Parkinson's patients around the
world. These people now can get acute symptoms treated with
L-dopa...That's almost a magical thing.''
Greengard, 74, and head of th=
e Laboratory of Molecular and
Cellular Neuroscience at Rockefeller University, New York, is
rewarded for his discovery of how dopamine and a number of
other transmitters act on the nervous system, the institute
said.
Greengard studied the way chemical signals operate in
something called ``slow synaptic transmission,'' which is
important for alertness and mood. Slow synaptic transmission
also controls fast synaptic transmission which makes speech,
movement and sensory perception possible.
Greengard's work increased un=
derstanding of the action of
several drugs and is important for the way anti-psychotic drugs
work, said psychiatry professor Marie Asberg.
``This made it possible f=
or the pharmaceutical industry to
discover drugs that work in this way and don't do a lot of
other things too,'' she said.
Austrian-born Kandel, 70, director of Col=
umbia University's
Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, is rewarded for his
discoveries of how the efficiency of synapses can be modified,
and how changes affect learning and memory, it said.
His work derives f=
rom his research into the way a sea slug,
which has far fewer nerve cells than a mammal, develops certain
reflexes, which is a form of learning.
Building on Greengard's research=
into the action of
proteins in synaptic transmission, Kandel demonstrated where
memory is located and how it is lost, making it possible in
future to develop new drugs for dementia diseases such as
Alzheimer's.
The prize is worth nine million Swedish crowns ($914,700)
this year.
The Nobel prizes, first awarded in 1901, were created by
Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite,
who died in 1896.
($1-9.839 Swedish Crown)