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Hutchinson center's Leland Hartwell awarded Nobel in medicine By Tim Klass, SEATTLE - When he first started doing research on cell division in yeast, Dr. Leland H. Hartwell (Caltech Alum: BS61BI) felt "alone in the woods." Today, the president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and professor of genetics at University of Washington in Seattle took his place with the giants as co-winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine. He shares the $943,000 prize with R. Timothy Hunt and Paul Nurse of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in England for basic discoveries in cell development. Hartwell said he was sleeping early today when a Hutchinson staffer called to give him the news. "It struck like a thunderbolt," he said. "The most significant aspect is the finding by many people of the relationship between very simple cells, like yeast cells, and human cells, the fact that very simple cells and human cells are closely related," Hartwell said. He said he was indebted to some 30 former graduate and postdoctoral students, "all the students in my lab who contributed to my work over the years." Awakened about 3 a.m., he celebrated with a bowl of Cream of Wheat and calmly fielded calls from reporters and a visit from a photographer. Later, he drove to a Starbucks cafe for a cup of coffee. At home, Hartwell appeared most animated when three grandchildren, Joe, 12, Ellen, 10, and Christopher, 3, the children of his daughter, Sherie Gage, called from Connecticut. He decided to wait until daybreak to tell his two sons in Seattle. Even the family dog, a black lab named Emma, got into the celebration and was allowed - just this once - to climb onto the sofa for a picture. Hartwell said he knew he might be considered for the Nobel Prize, especially after he won the Gairdner Foundation International Award for Achievements in Science in 1992 and Albert Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1998. More than one-fifth of the Lasker winners been awarded the Nobel. "You never know what year," Hartwell said. "It comes as a complete shock." The Nobel Prize recognizes Hartwell's 34 years of pathfinding research on thedevelopment of yeast cells and the cell division process. He and the British scientists have discovered key regulators of cell division and the way chromosomes are duplicated in the process - discoveries that are vital to understanding how genetic defects originate in cancer cells. That research is now about to be applied to diagnosing tumors and may someday lead to new therapies, the Nobel committee said. Hartwell, a native of Los Angeles, earned his bachelor's degree at California Institute of Technology in 1961 and his doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. He published his first paper on yeast cells in 1967 while working at the University of California in Irvine. He chose yeast cells because they are simpler and easier to manipulate in the laboratory than human cells. "I think it was sort of alone in the woods because I didn't think it was at all clear - it wasn't at all clear to me - that yeast cells were related to human cells," Hartwell said. In 1968, Hartwell joined the genetics department at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Around 1980, Nurse discovered that a key protein in process of cell division in yeast also is found in human cells, boosting the importance of Hartwell's continuing research into the genetics of yeast and the implications for cancer research. Nurse's discovery showed "that this was an important protein that has been preserved through evolution from the most simple organisms to higher life forms like frogs and humans," Hartwell said. In 1996, Hartwell took a faculty post at the Hutchinson center and in 1997 became president and director. Other awards he has won include the National Institutes of Health Merit Award in 1990, General Motors Sloan Award and Hoffman LaRoche Mattia Award in 1991, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Katherine Berkan Judd Award in 1994 and Genetics Society of America Medal in 1994. Hartwell is the Hutchinson center's second Nobel laureate. The first was Dr. E. Donnall Thomas in 1990 for research on bone-marrow transplants. The University of Washington has three other Nobel laureates: Hans Dehmelt in physics in 1989 and Drs. Edmond Fischer and Edwin Krebs together in 1990 in physiology. |