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The Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research is one of the prizes awarded by the Lasker Foundation for a fundamental discovery that opens up a new area of biomedical science. [1] The award frequently precedes a Nobel Prize in Medicine; almost 50% of the winners have gone on to win one.
| Year | Recipient |
|---|---|
| 1999 | Clay Armstrong |
| Bertil Hille | |
| Roderick MacKinnon | |
| 1998 | Leland H. Hartwell |
| Yoshio Masui | |
| Paul Nurse | |
| 1997 | Mark S. Ptashne |
| 1996 | Robert F. Furchgott |
| Ferid Murad | |
| 1995 | Peter C. Doherty |
| Jack L. Strominger | |
| Emil R. Unanue | |
| Don C. Wiley | |
| Rolf M. Zinkernagel | |
| 1994 | Stanley B. Prusiner |
| 1993 | Günter Blobel |
| 1992 | not awarded |
| 1991 | Edward B. Lewis |
| Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard | |
| 1990 | not awarded |
| 1989 | Michael J. Berridge |
| Alfred G. Gilman | |
| Edwin G. Krebs | |
| Yasutomi Nishizuka | |
| 1988 | Thomas R. Cech |
| Phillip A. Sharp | |
| 1987 | Leroy Hood |
| Philip Leder | |
| Susumu Tonegawa | |
| 1986 | Rita Levi-Montalcini |
| Stanley Cohen | |
| 1985 | Michael S. Brown |
| Joseph L. Goldstein | |
| 1984 | Michael Potter |
| Georges J. F. Köhler | |
| César Milstein | |
| 1983 | Eric R. Kandel |
| Vernon B. Mountcastle | |
| 1982 | J. Michael Bishop |
| Raymond L. Erikson | |
| Hidesaburo Hanafusa | |
| Harold E. Varmus | |
| Robert C. Gallo | |
| 1981 | Barbara McClintock |
| 1980 | Paul Berg |
| Herbert W. Boyer | |
| Stanley N. Cohen | |
| A. Dale Kaiser |
| Year | Recipient |
|---|---|
| 1979 | Walter Gilbert |
| Frederick Sanger | |
| Roger Wolcott Sperry | |
| 1978 | Hans W. Kosterlitz |
| John Hughes | |
| Solomon H. Snyder | |
| 1977 | K. Sune D. Bergström |
| Bengt Samuelsson | |
| John R. Vane | |
| 1976 | Rosalyn S. Yalow |
| 1975 | Roger C.L. Guillemin |
| Andrew V. Schally | |
| Frank J. Dixon | |
| Henry G. Kunkel | |
| 1974 | Ludwik Gross |
| Howard E. Skipper | |
| Sol Spiegelman | |
| Howard M. Temin | |
| 1973 | not awarded |
| 1972 | not awarded |
| 1971 | Seymour Benzer |
| Sydney Brenner | |
| Charles Yanofsky | |
| 1970 | Earl W. Sutherland |
| 1969 | Bruce Merrifield |
| 1968 | Marshall W. Nirenberg |
| H. Gobind Khorana | |
| William F. Windle | |
| 1967 | Bernard B. Brodie |
| 1966 | George E. Palade |
| 1965 | Robert W. Holley |
| 1964 | Renato Dulbecco |
| Harry Rubin (de) | |
| 1963 | Lyman C. Craig |
| 1962 | Choh H. Li |
| 1961 | not awarded |
| 1960 | M.H.F. Wilkins |
| F.H.C. Crick | |
| James D. Watson | |
| James V. Neel | |
| L.S. Penrose | |
| Ernst Ruska | |
| James Hillier |
| Year | Recipient |
|---|---|
| 1959 | Albert Coons |
| Jules Freund | |
| 1958 | Peyton Rous |
| Theodore Puck | |
| Alfred D. Hershey | |
| Gerhard Schramm (de) | |
| Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat | |
| Irvine H. Page | |
| 1957 | Isaac Starr |
| 1956 | Karl Meyer |
| Francis O. Schmitt | |
| 1955 | Karl Paul Link |
| Carl J. Wiggers | |
| 1954 | Edwin B. Astwood |
| John Franklin Enders | |
| Albert Szent-Györgyi | |
| 1953 | Hans A. Krebs |
| Michael Heidelberger | |
| George Wald | |
| 1952 | Frank Macfarlane Burnet |
| 1951 | Karl Friedrich Meyer |
| 1950 | George Wells Beadle |
| 1949 | André Cournand |
| William S. Tillett | |
| L. Royal Christensen | |
| 1948 | Vincent du Vigneaud |
| Selman Waksman | |
| René J. Dubos | |
| 1947 | Oswald T. Avery |
| Homer Smith | |
| 1946 | Carl Ferdinand Cori |
Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein, a scientific theory considered by many as a heretical idea when first proposed. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for research on prion diseases developed by him and his team of experts beginning in the early 1970s.
In 1945 Albert Lasker and Mary Woodard Lasker created the Lasker Awards. Every year since then the award has been given to the living person considered to have made the greatest contribution to medical science or who has demonstrated public service on behalf of medicine. They are administered by the Lasker Foundation. The Lasker is sometimes referred to as "America's Nobels".
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for development of the radioimmunoassay technique. She was the second woman, and the first American-born woman, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Joseph Leonard Goldstein ForMemRS is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin drugs.
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Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz 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, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins (snRNPs), which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87 of the former recipients have gone on to win Nobel prizes.
Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She is a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Arthur L. Horwich is an American biologist and Sterling Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. Horwich has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1990. His research into protein folding uncovered the action of chaperonins, protein complexes that assist the folding of other proteins; Horwich first published this work in 1989.
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Franz-Ulrich Hartl is a German biochemist and the current Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in chaperone-mediated protein folding.
Victor R. Ambros is an American developmental biologist and Nobel Laureate who discovered the first known microRNA (miRNA). He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He completed both his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ambros received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024 for his research on microRNA.
Napoleone Ferrara is an Italian-American molecular biologist who joined University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center in 2013 after a career in Northern California at the biotechnology giant Genentech, where he pioneered the development of new treatments for angiogenic diseases such as cancer, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and diabetic retinopathy. At Genentech, he discovered VEGF—and made the first anti-VEGF antibody—which suppresses growth of a variety of tumors. These findings helped lead to development of the first clinically available angiogenesis inhibitor, bevacizumab (Avastin), which prevents the growth of new blood vessels into a solid tumor and which has become part of standard treatment for a variety of cancers. Ferrara's work led also to the development of ranibizumab (Lucentis), a drug that is highly effective at preventing vision loss in intraocular neovascular disorders.
Brian J. Druker, M.D. is a physician-scientist at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), in Portland, Oregon. He is the chief executive officer of OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research, Associate Dean for Oncology in the OHSU School of Medicine, and professor of medicine.
James Patrick Allison 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 in Houston, Texas. Allison is Regental Professor and Founding-Director of James P. Allison Institute at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Karl Alexander Deisseroth is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Foundation Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
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 Medical Branch, Galveston, the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at Columbia University, former distinguished professor and the founding director of the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore, and former professor at Washington University in St. Louis and chairman at Duke University.
Kazutoshi Mori is a Japanese molecular biologist known for research on unfolded protein response. He is a professor of Biophysics at the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, and shared the 2014 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Peter Walter for discoveries concerning the unfolded protein response — an intracellular quality control system that detects harmful misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum and signals the nucleus to carry out corrective measures.
Gregg Leonard Semenza is an American pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had thirteen research papers retracted due to falsified data.
William G. Kaelin Jr. is an American Nobel laureate physician-scientist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. His laboratory studies tumor suppressor proteins. In 2016, Kaelin received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the AACR Princess Takamatsu Award. He also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019 along with Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza.
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