CECAD Cologne warmly congratulates Gary Ruvkun for sharing the 2008 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.
This Lasker Award is awarded to persons who made major contributions to medical science and is often referred to as the American Nobel Prize. Many recipients of this Award have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medice. Gary Ruvkun, a Harvard Medical School professor in the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Computational and Integrative Biology is a member of the External Scientific Advisory Board of CECAD Cologne. He shares the award with Victor Ambros of the University of the Massachusetts Medical School and David Baulcombe of the University of Cambridge. The award was given for discoveries that revealed an unanticipated world of tiny RNAs that regulate gene function in plants and animals. As a consequence it was realised that these molecules are pivotal regulators of normal physiology as well as disease.