Local News in Brief : Caltech Scientist Honored

Biotechnologist Leroy E. Hood of Caltech in Pasadena has been named the University of Pittsburgh’s 1986-1987 winner of the Dickson Prize in Medicine.

Hood’s research has been in immunology, lately conducting work on T-cell receptors, which are on the outside of white blood cells that perform a variety of immune system tasks, to understand how the cells respond in rejecting cancer and organ transplants.

Since the prize’s inception in 1970, five Dickson winners have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The prize is named after the late Joseph Z. Dickson, an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.