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Nobel medicine winner and the humble worm
( 2002-10-08 15:42 ) (7 )

Nobel prize winner Sir John Sulston had no inkling when a call came through to his office that he had won the 2002 award for medicine.

Although he was at his desk at the Sanger Center in Cambridge, the 60-year-old scientist missed the call and had to phone back the Nobel committee in Sweden before he could believe it was true.

"I got it as a message initially and then I phoned back which made it easier," he told Reuters. "I had time to ponder it and say 'is this real?'"

It was thanks to a humble worm.

Along with South African-born Sydney Brenner, a professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and founder of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, and American Robert Horvitz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, he will share the $1 million prize.

The three were chosen for their ground-breaking work on how genes regulate cell division and programmed cell death which contribute to human diseases.

"I'm just incredibly thrilled and honoured to be acknowledged in this way," said the white-haired and bearded Sulston, still obviously overwhelmed.

Although he headed the British arm of the Human Genome Project which sequenced the human genome, or book of life, the Nobel award is for work he had done much earlier on the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans.

HOW CELLS DIVIDE AND DIE

"This is going back to 1969 when I joined Sydney Brenner's group. He started it all, on his own, and then he took on a number of post-docs," he said. "We expanded and we found it was a really good system for looking at the control of cell lineage and cell death."

Because the nematode worm is so small, it was the ideal model organism for the scientists to follow cell division from the fertilized egg to the adult under the microscope.

In humans there are several hundred different cell types which specialise and turn into various tissues and organs such as blood, muscles and the nervous system.

Understanding the complicated processes of how cells divide, programmed cell death, or suicide, and how genes control the program can shed new light on human illnesses such as cancer, AIDS and heart disease.

Brenner's discoveries set the groundwork for the Nobel prize. Sulston identified the first mutation of a gene in the cell death process and Horvitz, who joined them, discovered and characterised key genes that control cell death in the worm.

"It was really very exciting. It was just looking down a microscope and discovering how it all worked in ways that people had not been able to see before," said Sulston.

"A number of these genes have similar functions in humans and when disrupted, when the genes are turned on or off inappropriately, can cause various sorts of problems."

Last year Paul Nurse and Timothy Hunt, of Britain's Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), now Cancer Research UK, and American Leland Hartwell, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, were honoured for their work in identifying essential components that control how cells replicate.

Sulston said the early work on the nematode worm and the sequencing of the human genome will advance medical science and the fight against disease.

"The worm really has contributed a lot to biology," he said.

"We felt it was exciting and important. We were uncovering a lot of new ground and that is what is being recognized."