2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 7 October 2002.

The citation

The citation reads: "for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Sydney Brenner was born in 1927 in Germiston, South Africa, and is affiliated with The Molecular Sciences Institute, Berkeley. H. Robert Horvitz was born in 1947 in Chicago, the United States, and is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. John E. Sulston was born in 1942 in Fulmer, United Kingdom, and is affiliated with The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge.

Why it matters

Working with a tiny worm, the three scientists showed how genes control the development of organs and how cells are programmed to die. Brenner and Sulston did much of their work in Cambridge, and Sulston went on to lead the British part of the Human Genome Project.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.