1989
Press release
Press release
NOBELFÖRSAMLINGEN KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET THE NOBEL ASSEMBLY AT THE KAROLINSKA INSTITUTE 9 October 1989 has today decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1989 jointly to J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus for their discovery of “the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes”. Summary The discovery awarded with this year’s Nobel Prize…
moreAward ceremony speech
Award ceremony speech
Presentation Speech by Professor Erling Norrby of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. Our body is composed of independent living entities, which we call cells. The number of cells in a single individual is about 1000 times larger than the number of all individuals on this…
moreHarold E. Varmus – Biographical
Biographical
I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the south shore of Long Island, a product of the early twentieth century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs. My father’s father, Jacob Varmus, left a village of uncertain name near Warsaw just after…
moreRibonucleic acid (RNA) – the biomolecule which can do it all
Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech have independently studied how the genetic code is transferred from DNA to RNA. They knew, however, that part of the genetic information is not required and must be removed from RNA before the RNA molecule can be utilized by the cell. While searching for the catalysts of RNA maturation, Altman…
moreThe chemistry of life and its central dogma
The genetic information flows from the DNA in our genetic material via RNA to proteins, which in turn construct cells with different functions. This principle is called the central dogma of the chemistry of life. It was previously believed that the nucleic acids DNA and RNA serve solely as carriers of the genetic information, whereas…
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