The Dickson Prize in Medicine and the Dickson Prize in Science were both established in 1969 by Joseph Z. Dickson and Agnes Fischer Dickson.
Dickson Prize in Medicine
The Dickson Prize in Medicine is awarded annually by the
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...
and recognizes US citizens who have made "significant, progressive contributions" to medicine.
The award includes $50,000, a bronze medal, and the Dickson Prize Lecture. Receiving the Dickson Prize in Medicine is strongly correlated with receiving the
Lasker Award
The Lasker Awards have been awarded annually since 1945 to living persons who have made major contributions to medical science or who have performed public service on behalf of medicine. They are administered by the Lasker Foundation, which was ...
and the
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
.
Recipients
Source
University of Pittsburgh
* 1971
Earl W. Sutherland Jr.
Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr. (November 19, 1915 – March 9, 1974) was an American pharmacologist and biochemist born in Burlingame, Kansas. Sutherland won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1971 "for his discoveries concerning the mechani ...
* 1972
Solomon A. Berson and
Rosalyn S. Yalow
* 1973
John H. Gibbon Jr.
* 1974
Stephen W. Kuffler
* 1975
Elizabeth F. Neufeld
* 1976
Frank J. Dixon
* 1977
Roger Guillemin
Roger Charles Louis Guillemin (born January 11, 1924) is a French-American neuroscientist. He received the National Medal of Science in 1976, and the Nobel prize for medicine in 1977 for his work on neurohormones, sharing the prize that year ...
* 1978
Paul Greengard
Paul Greengard (December 11, 1925 – April 13, 2019) was an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for ...
* 1979
Bert W. O'Malley
* 1980
David H. Hubel
David Hunter Hubel (February 27, 1926 – September 22, 2013) was a Canadian American neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the visual cortex. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Pri ...
and
Torsten N. Wiesel
* 1981
Philip Leder
Philip Leder (November 19, 1934 – February 2, 2020) was an American geneticist.
Early life and education
Leder was born in Washington, D.C. and studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1956. In 1960, he graduated from Harvard Medical Sc ...
* 1982
Francis H. Ruddle
* 1983
Eric R. Kandel
* 1984
Solomon H. Snyder
* 1985
Robert C. Gallo
* 1986
J. Michael Bishop
John Michael Bishop (born February 22, 1936) is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was co-winner of 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize. He serves as an activ ...
* 1987
Elvin A. Kabat
Elvin Abraham Kabat (September 1, 1914 – June 16, 2000) was an American
biomedical scientist and one of the founding fathers of modern quantitative immunochemistry. Kabat was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1 ...
* 1988
Leroy E. Hood
Leroy "Lee" Edward Hood (born October 10, 1938) is an American biologist who has served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Washington.
Hood has developed ground-breaking scientific instrume ...
* 1989
Bernard Moss
Bernard Moss (born July 26, 1937 in Brooklyn) is a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the United States National Institutes of Health. He is the Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Viral Diseases and of ...
* 1990
Ernst Knobil
Ernst Knobil (September 20, 1926 – April 13, 2000) was a scientist known for his pioneering research in endocrinology. His discoveries were important for the field of reproductive endocrinology, the development of hormonal contraceptives, and ...
* 1991
Phillip A. Sharp
Phillip Allen Sharp (born June 6, 1944) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in euka ...
* 1992
Francis Sellers Collins
Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (N ...
* 1993
Stanley B. Prusiner
* 1994
Bert Vogelstein
Bert Vogelstein (born 1949) is director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pi ...
* 1995
Ronald M. Evans
Ronald Mark Evans (born April 17, 1949 in Los Angeles, California) is an American Biologist, Professor and Head of the Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology at the Salk Institute fo ...
* 1996
Philippa Marrack
* 1997
Ed Harlow and
Eric Steven Lander
* 1998
Richard D. Klausner
* 1999
James E. Darnell Jr.
* 2000
Elizabeth H. Blackburn (Dickson Prize Lecture, April 13, 2000: "Telomere Capping and Cell Proliferation")
* 2001
Robert G. Roeder
Robert G. Roeder (born June 3, 1942, in Boonville, Indiana, United States) is an American biochemist. He is known as a pioneer scientist in eukaryotic transcription. He discovered three distinct nuclear RNA polymerases in 1969 and characterize ...
(Dickson Prize Lecture, September 12, 2001: "Regulation of Transcription in Human Cells: Complexities and Challenges")
* 2002
C. David Allis (Dickson Prize Lecture, September 18, 2002: "Translating the Histone Code: A Tale of Tails")
* 2003
Susan L. Lindquist (Dickson Prize Lecture, September 24, 2003: "Protein Conformation as a Pathway to Understanding Cellular Processes, Disease and Bio-Inspired Materials")
* 2004
Elaine Fuchs
Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which ...
(Dickson Prize Lecture, 2004: "Skin Stem Cells and Their Lineages")
* 2005
Ronald W. Davis
Ronald Wayne "Ron" Davis (born July 17, 1941) is Professor of Biochemistry & Genetics, and Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford University. Davis is a researcher in biotechnology and molecular genetics, particularly activ ...
(Dickson Prize Lecture, 2005: "New Genomic Technology for Yeast Applied to Clinical Medicine")
* 2006
Roger D. Kornberg
Roger David Kornberg (born April 24, 1947) is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which ...
(Dickson Prize Lecture, October 5, 2006: "Chromatin and Transcription")
* 2007
Carol W. Greider
Carolyn Widney Greider (born April 15, 1961) is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology ...
(Dickson Prize Lecture, October 11, 2007: "Telomerase and the Consequences of Telomere Dysfunction")
* 2008
Randy W. Schekman (Dickson Prize Lecture, "Dissecting the Secretion Process: From Basic Mechanism to Human Disease")
* 2009
Victor Ambros
Victor R. Ambros (born 1953, Hanover, New Hampshire) is an American developmental biologist who discovered the first known microRNA (miRNA). He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Back ...
(Dickson Prize Lecture, "MicroRNAs, from Model Organisms to Human Biology.")
* 2010
Stephen J. Elledge
Stephen Joseph Elledge (born August 7, 1956, in Paris Illinois) is an American geneticist. He is currently the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and Medicine in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and in the Division of Geneti ...
* 2011
J. Craig Venter
* 2012
Brian J. Druker
* 2013
Huda Y. Zoghbi (Dickson Prize Lecture, Thursday, October 3, 2013: "
Rett Syndrome
Rett syndrome (RTT) is a genetic disorder that typically becomes apparent after 6–18 months of age and almost exclusively in females. Symptoms include impairments in language and coordination, and repetitive movements. Those affected often h ...
and
MECP2
''MECP2'' (methyl CpG binding protein 2) is a gene that encodes the protein MECP2. MECP2 appears to be essential for the normal function of nerve cells. The protein seems to be particularly important for mature nerve cells, where it is present in ...
Disorders: From the
Clinic
A clinic (or outpatient clinic or ambulatory care clinic) is a health facility that is primarily focused on the care of outpatients. Clinics can be privately operated or publicly managed and funded. They typically cover the primary care needs ...
to
Genes
In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...
and
Neurobiology
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...
.")
* 2014
Jeffrey I. Gordon
Jeffrey I. Gordon (born 1947) is a biologist and the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is internationally known f ...
* 2015
Karl Deisseroth
Karl Alexander Deisseroth (born November 18, 1971) is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
He is known for creating and developing the technolo ...
* 2016
Jennifer Doudna
Jennifer Anne Doudna (; born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a ...
* 2017
David M. Sabatini
David M. Sabatini (born January 27, 1968) is an American scientist and a former professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2002 to 2021, he was a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was also ...
* 2018
Bonnie Bassler
Bonnie Lynn Bassler (born 1962) is an American molecular biologist; the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She h ...
* 2019
Ruslan Medzhitov
Ruslan Maksutovich Medzhitov (born March 12, 1966) is a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, a member of Yale Cancer Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. His research focuses on the analysis of the innate i ...
* 2020
James J. Collins
Dickson Prize in Science
The Dickson Prize in Science is awarded annually by
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
and recognizes those who "have made the most progress in the scientific field in the United States for the year in question."
The award is dated by the year in which it was announced, which is often the year before the lecture occurs.
Recipients
Source
Carnegie Mellon University
* 1971
Richard Bellman
Richard Ernest Bellman (August 26, 1920 – March 19, 1984) was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founde ...
* 1972
George Palade and
Keith Roberts Porter
Keith Roberts Porter (June 11, 1912 – May 2, 1997) was a Canadian- American cell biologist. He created pioneering biology techniques and research using electron microscopy of cells. Porter also contributed to the development of other experime ...
* 1973
* 1974
Elias J. Corey
Elias James Corey (born July 12, 1928) is an American organic chemist. In 1990, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis", specifically retrosynthetic analysis. Regarded by many ...
* 1975
David H. Geiger
David H. Geiger (1935 – October 3, 1989) was an American engineer who invented the Air-supported structure, air-supported fabric roof system that at the time of his death was in use at almost half the domed stadiums in the world.
Geiger was born ...
, civil engineering
* 1975 – ''not awarded''
* 1977 – ''not awarded''
* 1978
John H. Sinfelt
John H. Sinfelt (February 18, 1931 in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, Munson, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania – May 28, 2011 in Morristown, New Jersey) was an American chemical engineer whose research on catalytic reforming was responsible for t ...
* 1979
Seymour Benzer
* 1980 – ''not awarded''
* 1981
John Werner Cahn
* 1982 – ''not awarded''
* 1983
Harden M. McConnell
* 1983–84
Edward Fredkin
Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics.
Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. ...
* 1986
Norman Davidson
* 1987
Benjamin Widom
Benjamin Widom (born 13 October 1927) is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. His research interests include physical chemistry and statistical mechanics. In 1998, Widom was awarded the Boltzmann Medal "for his illumin ...
* 1988
Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum (December 19, 1944 – June 30, 2019) was an American mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants.
Early life
Feigenbaum was born in Philadelphia, Pe ...
* 1989
Joan A. Steitz
Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz (born January 26, 1941) is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, inc ...
* 1990
Richard E. Dickerson
* 1991
F. Sherwood Rowland
Frank Sherwood "Sherry" Rowland (June 28, 1927 – March 10, 2012) was an American Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research was on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. His be ...
* 1992
David Botstein
David Botstein (born September 8, 1942) is an American biologist serving as the chief scientific officer of Calico. He served as the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003 to 2013, where ...
* 1993
Paul Lauterbur
Paul Christian Lauterbur (May 6, 1929 – March 27, 2007) was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) poss ...
* 1994
Vera Rubin
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (; July 23, 1928 – December 25, 2016) was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by study ...
* 1995
Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and e ...
* 1996
Leland Hartwell
Leland Harrison (Lee) Hartwell (born October 30, 1939 in Los Angeles, California) is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine wit ...
* 1997
* 1998
Walter Alvarez
Walter Alvarez (born October 3, 1940) is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most widely known for the theory that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact, developed in ...
* 1999
Peter Shor
Peter Williston Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially fa ...
, 25th recipient (Dickson Lecture, November 8, 1999, "Quantum Computing")
* 2000
Howard Raiffa
Howard Raiffa (; January 24, 1924 – July 8, 2016) was an American academic who was the Frank P. Ramsey Professor (Emeritus) of Managerial Economics, a joint chair held by the Business School and Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He w ...
(Dickson Lecture, Tue. April 4, 2000: "Analytical Roots of a Decision Scientist"
* 2001
Alexander Pines
Alexander Pines (born June 22, 1945) is an American chemist. He is the Glenn T. Seaborg Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berke ...
(Dickson Lecture, April 11, 2001: "Some Magnetic Moments"
* 2002
Carver Mead
Carver Andress Mead (born May 1, 1934) is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), ...
(Dickson Lecture, March 19, 2002: "The Coming Revolution in Photography")
* 2003
Robert Langer
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng (born August 29, 1948) is an American chemical engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, inventor and one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He was formerly the Germeshau ...
(Dickson Lecture, February 26, 2003: "Biomaterials And How They Will Change Our Lives")
* 2004
Marc W. Kirschner
Marc Wallace Kirschner (born February 28, 1945) is an Americans, American cell biologist and biochemist and the founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He is known for major discoveries in cell and developmen ...
(Dickson Lecture, March 30, 2004: "Timing the Inner Cell Cycle")
* 2005
George Whitesides (Dickson Lecture, March 28, 2005: "Assumptions: If common assumptions about the modern world break down, then what could science and technology make happen?")
* 2006
David Haussler
David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that d ...
(Dickson Lecture, March 9, 2006: "Ultraconserved elements, living fossil transposons, and rapid bursts of change: reconstructing the uneven evolutionary history of the human genome"
* 2007
Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American geographer, historian, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books ''The Third Chimpanzee'' (1991); ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); ...
(Dickson Lecture, March 26, 2007: "Collapse")
* 2008
Jean Fréchet
Jean M.J. Fréchet (born August 1944) is a French-American chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his work on polymers including polymer-supported chemistry, chemically amplified photores ...
* 2009
Richard M. Karp
* 2010
Saul Perlmutter
Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ...
(Dickson Lecture, March 17, 2010: "Stalking Dark Energy & the Mystery of the Accelerating Universe")
* 2011
David A. Tirrell
* 2011
Marvin L. Cohen (March 8, 2012: "Einstein, Condensed Matter Physics, Nanoscience & Superconductivity")
* 2013
François M. M. Morel (March 12, 2013: "Ocean Acidification: Causes, Time Scales & Consequences")
* 2014
Karl Deisseroth
Karl Alexander Deisseroth (born November 18, 1971) is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
He is known for creating and developing the technolo ...
(February 3, 2014: "Illuminating the Brain")
* 2015
Joseph M. DeSimone (February 16, 2015: "Breakthroughs in Imprint Lithography and 3D Additive Fabrication")
* 2016
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on beli ...
(February 29, 2016 : "Science, Counterfactuals and Free Will")
* 2017
Chad A. Mirkin (February 2, 2017 : "Nanotechnology: Small Things Matter")
* 2018
Jennifer Doudna
Jennifer Anne Doudna (; born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a ...
(February 1, 2018: "CRISPR Systems: Nature's Toolkit for Genome Editing"
)
* 2019
Emery N. Brown (January 31, 2019: "The Dynamics of the Unconscious Brain Under General Anesthesia")
* 2020
Geraldine Richmond
Geraldine Lee Richmond (born January 17, 1953 in Salina, Kansas) is an American chemist and physical chemist who is serving as the Under Secretary of Energy for Science in the US Department of Energy. Richmond was confirmed to her DOE role by the ...
(February 11, 2020: "Surf, Sink or Swim: Understanding Environmentally Important Processes at Water Surfaces")
Further reading
Dickson Prize in Science at Carnegie Mellon UniversityDickson Prize in Medicine at University of Pittsburgh
See also
*
List of medicine awards
This list of medicine awards is an index to articles about notable awards for contributions to medicine, the science and practice of establishing the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. The list is organized by region and ...
Notes
{{reflist, 2
Medicine awards
Awards established in 1969
Carnegie Mellon University