UCLA Researcher Shares Medicine Prize

The 1988 Wolf Foundation prize in medicine will be awarded to a UCLA researcher and a Belgian for their discoveries in the field of genetic diseases, the foundation announced in Jerusalem.

The $100,000 award will be shared by Dr. Elizabeth F. Neufeld, who teaches biochemistry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and Dr. Henri-Gery Hers of the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium.

The French-born, 49-year-old Neufeld, the third woman to win the prize, was honored for her work on genetic diseases, including the study of defects in enzymes.

Hers, 64, discovered the first in an important group of genetic diseases called storage diseases, in which substances normally broken down by the body accumulate.

Through their work “it has now become possible, in this group of rare and tragically crippling diseases, to provide genetic counseling, to effect prenatal diagnosis and even to investigate the possibility of replacement therapy,” said a statement from the Israel-based foundation, which makes six $100,000 awards annually in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, agriculture, mathematics and the arts.

Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog, will present the prizes in a ceremony at Parliament in May, 1988.