Medicine Nobel goes to cellular transport research
By Tina Hesman Saey and Nathan Seppa
By Science News
Research on the machinery that guides intracellular bubbles stuffed with molecular cargo has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The Nobel committee selected Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley, James Rothman of the Yale School of Medicine, and Thomas Südhof of Stanford University to share the award.
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Working independently, the researchers described components of the machinery that moves cargo around cells and gives the signal to dispatch it to its destination. The equipment is fundamental to cells’ functioning; without vesicle transport, “the cell would lapse into chaos,” says Juleen Zierath, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who chairs the Nobel committee.