Columbia Awards 2010 Horwitz Prize to Scientists who Identified Steps of DNA Replication
Columbia University has named Thomas J. Kelly of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Bruce W. Stillman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory recipients of the 2010 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for their combined work to understand how genetic material replicates. Drs. Kelly’s and Stillman’s research guides current study of how this process goes wrong when cancer occurs.
“These two investigators, more than any others, are responsible for discovering the key molecular players in and the principles that govern the process of genetic replication,” said Wayne A. Hendrickson, Ph.D., chair of the Horwitz Prize Committee, University Professor and Violin Family Professor of Physiology & Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University.
Thomas J. Kelly Bruce W. Stillman
Kelly has been director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute since 2002. Previously, he was a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he and his colleagues did much of his prize-winning research. Stillman has been president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 2003. He joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a post-doctoral fellow in 1979 and has been there ever since.
In explaining the selection of Drs. Kelly and Stillman by Columbia University, Dr. Hendrickson said that both have given science a much-needed understanding of the way eukaryotic cells work in humans, shedding light on the genetic duplication of normal cells and as well as some of the processes involved in cancer growth.
The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize was established under the will of the late S. Gross Horwitz through a bequest to Columbia University. It is named to honor the donor's mother. Louisa Gross Horwitz was the daughter of Dr. Samuel David Gross (1805-1889), a prominent Philadelphia surgeon. Gross was author of the outstanding Systems of Surgery and served as President of the American Medical Association. For more information and to see a list of previous awardees, please click here. Of the 82 Horwitz Prize winners to date, 42 have gone on to receive Nobel prizes. To visit the homepage of the Horwitz Prize, please click here.
Each year, since its inception in 1967, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize has been awarded by Columbia University for outstanding basic research in the fields of biology or biochemistry. The purpose of this award is to honor a scientific investigator, or group of investigators, whose contributions to knowledge in either of these fields are deemed worthy of special recognition. The Prize consists of an honorarium and a citation which will be awarded at a special presentation event on February, 17, 2011.
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