Caltech Geneticist Wins Research Prize

A Caltech molecular geneticist whose research has helped to revolutionize genetic engineering and biology is among the winners of this year’s prestigious Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, it was announced Monday.

Dr. Leroy Hood, chairman of Caltech’s biology department, and Dr. Philip Leder of Harvard and Dr. Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology share the 1987 award for discovering the structure of antibodies.

A fourth winner is Dr. Mogens Schou, a Danish psychiatrist who was the first to show that the drug lithium is an effective treatment of manic-depression, a mental illness that affects about 50 million people.

Since 1944, when the Lasker Award was introduced, 42 winners have gone on to earn a Nobel Prize. Each of this year’s winners will receive $15,000 and a statuette.

Over the last 10 years, Hood and his Caltech colleagues have developed four machines that enable scientists to synthesize and analyze proteins and genes in more effective ways than were previously possible.

The machines have a wide range of application in learning more, on a molecular level, about how biological systems work, ranging from immunity to the nervous system.

Leder conducted studies showing the genetic basis for the enormous diversity of antibodies that the body is capable of producing. Tonegawa’s contribution was to show that this diversity is the result of an ordered system of gene rearrangement and that the DNA responsible for antibody production is routinely reorganized to create new genes during the lifetime of the individual.

Genetics is believed to play a role also in manic-depression, a disorder in which patients experience extreme changes in mood, alternating between hyperactive “highs” and severe “lows.” These mood swings are believed to be due to chemical abnormalities that largely are determined by heredity.

In 1954 Schou, who is a professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University Institute of Psychiatry, published the first scientific study showing that lithium can stop manic episodes. Two years earlier an Australian, Dr. John Cade, had found similar results in a small study but his results were not accepted by most psychiatrists.

Schou’s findings, which subsequently showed the drug to be effective also in the depression phase of the illness, were hailed as a major medical breakthrough in the treatment of mental illness.