Nobel Prize Winners (2001)

Hutch Director Lee Hartwell Wins Nobel Prize

Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and also Professor of Genetics at the University of Washington, today was named winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Considered the world's most distinguished honor for outstanding contributions to basic and clinical medical research, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, selected Hartwell for his pioneering work in yeast genetics.

Hartwell is being honored for the discovery of the universal mechanism that controls cell division in all eukaryotic (nucleated) organisms, from yeast to frogs to humans. Using yeast as a model organism, he was the first to harness the tools of genetics to study how cells function - to determine which genes cause cells to divide.

The regulation of cell division - how cells determine when and how to multiply or otherwise develop, and how that process can go awry - is fundamental to understanding how cancer cells mutate and to developing approaches that predict, prevent or reverse that mutation.

"People just didn't understand the fundamentals of cell-division regulation until Lee came along," says colleague James Roberts, M.D., Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and member of the Center's Basic Sciences Division.

"What Lee did 25 years ago was essentially provide us with a list of all the important genes involved in controlling cell proliferation. This has proven to be invaluable in interpreting and using today's gene-sequence data," he says. "Second, Lee provided a logical framework to understand how these genes cooperate and work together to control cell division. Thus, he was not merely a cataloger of genes, but he also was able to explain how they worked."

Hartwell decided more than 30 years ago to study yeast cells because they are simpler and easier to manipulate than human cells. At the time, Hartwell recalls, this was "a fairly risky assumption," as he was the only person looking at yeast cells to find genes that control cell development. Thanks to Hartwell's groundbreaking efforts, scientists now know that yeast is a superb model for studying many basic cellular processes, since its cellular machinery is found in virtually all nucleated organisms. Today, the yeast-related research of Hartwell and his colleagues is being used at the Hutchinson Center to develop drugs for use against cancer and other diseases.

Hartwell is the recipient of many national and international scientific awards for his work in cell-cycle biology, including the Leopold Griffuel Prize, the Massry Prize, the American Cancer Society's Medal of Honor Basic Research Award, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Prize, the General Motors Sloan Award and the Gairdner Foundation International Award for Achievements in Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

< Back to Novel Prizes