"The 2006 awards honor outstanding achievements in our understanding of our cells with major ramifications for cancer, nutrition, auto-immune disease, atherosclerosis and hormone action," said John Dirks, president of the Gairdner Foundation. The awards will be presented on October 26 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.
Joan A. Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, will be honored for her "discovery of the reactivity of autoimmune sera with nuclear riboprotein particles and elucidation of the rules of small nuclear RNA in gene expression." Thomas D. Pollard, M.D., Sterling Professor and chair of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale will also receive the award. He will be recognized along with Alan Hall, FRS, chair of the Cell Biology Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York for their "discoveries related to understanding the cytoskeleton of the cell and the basis of cell motility and its relevance to human disease." The Gairdner Foundation was established in 1957 by Toronto businessman James A. Gairdner, a successful stockbroker and industrialist. Gairdner's lifelong practical interest in clinical medicine and medical research led to his conviction that the achievements of medical scientists should be acknowledged in a tangible way.
Since 1959, the Gairdner International Awards have recognized extraordinary accomplishment in medical sc
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Contact: Janet Rettig Emanuel
janet.emanuel@yale.edu
203-432-2157
Yale University
5-Apr-2006