The Massry Prize was established in 1996, and until 2009 was administered by the Meira and Shaul G. Massry Foundation. The Prize, of $40,000 and the Massry Lectureship, is bestowed upon scientists who have made substantial recent contributions in the

biomedical Biomedicine (also referred to as Western medicine, mainstream medicine or conventional medicine)

sciences. Shaul G. Massry, M.D., who established the Massry Foundation, is

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pract ...

and

Physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...

and

Biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ...

at the

Keck School of Medicine The Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California teaches and trains physicians, biomedical scientists and other healthcare professionals, conducts medical research, and treats patients. Founded in 1885, it is the second oldest ...

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

. He served as Chief of its Division of

Nephrology Nephrology (from Greek'' nephros'' "kidney", combined with the suffix ''-logy'', "the study of") is a specialty of adult internal medicine and pediatric medicine that concerns the study of the kidneys, specifically normal kidney function (ren ...

from 1974 to 2000. In 2009 the KECK School of Medicine was asked to administer the Prize, and has done so since that time. Ten winners of the Massry Prize have gone on to be awarded a

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 ...

Previous laureates

Source
KECK School of Medicine
* 1996

Michael Berridge Sir Michael John Berridge (22 October 1938 – 13 February 2020) was a British physiologist and biochemist. Born and raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he was best known for his work on cellular transmembrane signalling, in pa ...

in the field of

Signal Transduction Signal transduction is the process by which a chemical or physical signal is transmitted through a cell as a series of molecular events, most commonly protein phosphorylation catalyzed by protein kinases, which ultimately results in a cellula ...

* 1997

Judah Folkman Moses Judah Folkman (February 24, 1933 – January 14, 2008) was an American medical scientist best known for his research on tumor angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor attracts blood vessels to nourish itself and sustain its existence. He ...

in the field of

Growth Factors A growth factor is a naturally occurring substance capable of stimulating cell proliferation, wound healing, and occasionally cellular differentiation. Usually it is a secreted protein or a steroid hormone. Growth factors are important for regu ...

* 1998

Mark Ptashne Mark Ptashne (born June 5, 1940, in Chicago) is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Re ...

in the field of Regulation of Transcription * 1999 Gunter Blobel in the field of

Protein Trafficking :''This article deals with protein targeting in eukaryotes unless specified otherwise.'' Protein targeting or protein sorting is the biological mechanism by which proteins are transported to their appropriate destinations within or outside the c ...

. Blobel received the 1999

in Physiology and Medicine two months after his receipt of the Massry Prize. * 2000

Leland H. 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 ...

in the field of

Cell Cycle The cell cycle, or cell-division cycle, is the series of events that take place in a cell that cause it to divide into two daughter cells. These events include the duplication of its DNA (DNA replication) and some of its organelles, and subs ...

. Hartwell won the 2001

in Physiology and Medicine one year after he received the Massry Prize. * 2001

Avram Hershko Avram Hershko ( he, אברהם הרשקו, Avraham Hershko, hu, Herskó Ferenc Ábrahám; born December 31, 1937) is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004. Biography He was born Herskó Ferenc in Karc ...

and

Alexander Varshavsky Alexander Jacob Varshavsky (russian: link=no, Александр Яковлевич Варшавский; born 8 November 1946) is a Russian-American biochemist, noted for his discovery of the N-end rule of ubiquitination. A native of Moscow, he is ...

in the field of

Proteolysis Proteolysis is the breakdown of proteins into smaller polypeptides or amino acids. Uncatalysed, the hydrolysis of peptide bonds is extremely slow, taking hundreds of years. Proteolysis is typically catalysed by cellular enzymes called protease ...

and the

Ubiquitin Ubiquitin is a small (8.6 kDa) regulatory protein found in most tissues of eukaryotic organisms, i.e., it is found ''ubiquitously''. It was discovered in 1975 by Gideon Goldstein and further characterized throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Fo ...

System. Hershko won the 2004

in Chemistry three years after he won the Massry Prize. * 2002

Mario Capecchi Mario Ramberg Capecchi (born 6 October 1937) is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-awardee of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knoc ...

and

Oliver Smithies Oliver Smithies (23 June 1925 – 10 January 2017) was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capec ...

for their pioneering work on

Gene targeting Gene targeting (also, replacement strategy based on homologous recombination) is a genetic technique that uses homologous recombination to modify an endogenous gene. The method can be used to delete a gene, remove exons, add a gene and modify ind ...

. They received the 2007

in Physiology and Medicine five years after they won the Massry Prize. * 2003

Roger 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 ...

David Allis Charles David Allis (March 22, 1951 – January 8, 2023) was an American molecular biologist, and the Joy and Jack Fishman Professor at the Rockefeller University. He was also the Head of the Laboratory of Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics, ...

and

Michael Grunstein Michael Grunstein (born 1946, in Romania) is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The only surviving child of Holocaust survivors, he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree f ...

in the field of Nuclear Chromatin. Kornberg won the 2006

in Chemistry three years after he received the Massry Prize. * 2004

Ada Yonath Ada E. Yonath ( he, עדה יונת, ; born 22 June 1939) is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular S ...

and Harry Nolla in the field of Ribosomal Structure. Yonath won the 2009

in Chemistry five years after she received the Massry Prize. * 2005

Andrew Fire Andrew Zachary Fire (born April 27, 1959) is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello ...

Craig Mello Craig Cameron Mello (born October 18, 1960) is an American biologist and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, ...

and

David Baulcombe Sir David Charles Baulcombe One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 1952) is a British plant scientist and geneticist. he is a Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Profe ...

in the field of

RNAi RNA interference (RNAi) is a biological process in which RNA molecules are involved in sequence-specific suppression of gene expression by double-stranded RNA, through translational or transcriptional repression. Historically, RNAi was known by o ...

. Fire and Mello won the 2006

in Physiology and Medicine one year after they received the Massry Prize. * 2006 Akira Endo in the field of Novel Therapies specifically for the Discovery of

Statin Statins, also known as HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, are a class of lipid-lowering medications that reduce illness and mortality in those who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease. They are the most common cholesterol-lowering drugs. Low- ...

s * 2007

Michael Phelps Michael Fred Phelps II (born June 30, 1985) is an American former competitive swimmer. He is the most successful and most decorated Olympian of all time with a total of 28 medals. Phelps also holds the all-time records for Olympic gold me ...

for the development of the

PET Scan Positron emission tomography (PET) is a functional imaging technique that uses radioactive substances known as radiotracers to visualize and measure changes in metabolic processes, and in other physiological activities including blood flow, r ...

and its Clinical Application * 2008

Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese stem cell researcher and a Nobel Prize laureate. He serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell (induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto ...

, James A. Thomson, and

Rudolf Jaenisch Rudolf Jaenisch (born April 22, 1942) is a Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch h ...

for their work in the field of

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Induced pluripotent stem cells (also known as iPS cells or iPSCs) are a type of pluripotent stem cell that can be generated directly from a somatic cell. The iPSC technology was pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka's lab in Kyoto, Japan, who showed in ...

Shinya Yamanaka received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine * 2009

Gary Ruvkun Gary Bruce Ruvkun (born March 1952, Berkeley, California) is an American molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Ruvkun discovered the mechanism by which ''lin-4'', th ...

and

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 ...

for their work in the field of

Micro RNA MicroRNA (miRNA) are small, single-stranded, non-coding RNA molecules containing 21 to 23 nucleotides. Found in plants, animals and some viruses, miRNAs are involved in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRN ...

* 2010

Randy Schekman Randy Wayne Schekman (born December 30, 1948) is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' and former editor of ''Annual Review of Cell and ...

for his work regarding the molecular mechanism of defects in secretion that lead to human diseases of development such as

spina bifida Spina bifida (Latin for 'split spine'; SB) is a birth defect in which there is incomplete closing of the spine and the membranes around the spinal cord during early development in pregnancy. There are three main types: spina bifida occulta, me ...

. He received 2013 Nobel in Physiology and Medicine. * 2011

Franz-Ulrich Hartl Franz-Ulrich Hartl (born 10 March 1957) is a German biochemist and Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in the field of protein-mediated protein folding and is a recipient of the 2011 ...

and Arthur Horwich for work on Chaperone-assisted protein folding * 2012

Michael Rosbash Michael Morris Rosbash (born March 7, 1944) is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Rosbash is a professor and researcher at Brandeis University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Rosbash's research group cloned the ...

, Jeffrey C. Hall and

Michael W. Young Michael Warren Young (born March 28, 1949) is an American biologist and geneticist. He has dedicated over three decades to research studying genetically controlled patterns of sleep and wakefulness within ''Drosophila melanogaster''. At Rock ...

for their groundbreaking studies of the molecular basis of

circadian rhythms A circadian rhythm (), or circadian cycle, is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. It can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., endogenous) and responds to ...

. They received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2017. * 2013

Michael Sheetz Michael Patrick Sheetz is a cell biologist, a pioneer of mechanobiology and biomechanics, and a key contributor to the discovery of kinesin. He serves as the Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas Med ...

, James A. Spudich and Ronald D. Vale for their work defining molecular mechanisms of intracellular motility * 2014

Steven Rosenberg Steven A. Rosenberg (born 2 August 1940) is an American cancer researcher and surgeon, chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and a Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences an ...

Zelig Eshhar Zelig Eshhar is an Israeli immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. He was Chairman of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute twice, in the 1990s and 2000s. Biography Zelig Lipka ...

and

James P. Allison James Patrick Allison (born August 7, 1948) is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the Uni ...

for their research on T cells. * 2015

Philippe Horvath Philippe Horvath is a French scientist working for DuPont Nutrition and Health. His work was integral to the development of CRISPR-Cas, a versatile biochemical method for targeted genetic engineering. For this work, he was awarded the 2015 Mas ...

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 ...

and

Emmanuelle Charpentier Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (; born 11 December 1968) is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. As of 2015, she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, sh ...

for their research on gene editing. * 2016

Gero Miesenböck Gero Andreas Miesenböck (born 15 July 1965) is an Austrian scientist. He is currently Waynflete Professor of Physiology and Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB) at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen ...

Peter Hegemann Peter Hegemann (born 11 December 1954) is a Hertie Senior Research Chair for Neurosciences and a Professor of Experimental Biophysics at the Department of Biology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is known ...

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 ...

for their research on

optogenetics Optogenetics is a biological technique to control the activity of neurons or other cell types with light. This is achieved by expression of light-sensitive ion channels, pumps or enzymes specifically in the target cells. On the level of individu ...

. * 2017 Rob Knight, Jeffrey Gordon,

Norman R. Pace Norman Richard Pace Jr. (born 1942) is an American biochemist, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado. He is principal investigator at the Pace lab. Early life and ...

for their discovery of the

microbiome A microbiome () is the community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat. It was defined more precisely in 1988 by Whipps ''et al.'' as "a characteristic microbial community occupying a reasonably well ...

s. * 2018 Gregg Semenza, William Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe * 2019

Ryszard Kole Ryszard Kole (Polish: ) is a Polish-American pharmacologist and professor emeritus in the Pharmacology Department at the UNC School of Medicine within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is known for his research on control of ge ...

, Stanley T. Crooke for their seminal work in the development of oligonucleotides targeting messenger RNA as novel therapeutics for a wide range human diseases. * 2021

Svante Pääbo Svante Pääbo (; born 20 April 1955) is a Swedish geneticist who specialises in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. In 1997, he became founding dire ...

, David Reich, Liran Carmel

References

{{Reflist Biomedical awards Academic awards

Previous laureates

See also

References