Recent winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine

Here is a list of Nobel Prize winners in medicine for the past 10 years:

2022 year: Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo for the discoveries of the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

2021: American duo David Julius and Ardem Pataputyan for the discovery of the human receptors responsible for our ability to sense temperature and touch.

2020: Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice, along with Britain’s Michael Houghton, for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, which led to the development of sensitive blood tests and antiviral drugs.

2019: William Kellin and Greg Semenza, USA, and Peter Ratcliffe, UK, for building the foundation of our understanding of how cells respond and adapt to different levels of oxygen.

2018: Immunologists James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for figuring out how to release immune systembrake to allow him to attack cancer cells more efficiently.

2017: American geneticists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young for the discovery of the internal biological clock that regulates the wake-sleep cycles of most living things.

2016: Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his work on autophagy, a process in which cells “eat themselves” – which, when violated, can cause Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.

2015: Irish-born US citizen William Campbell, Japan’s Satoshi Omura, and China’s Tu Yuyo for unlocking treatments for malaria and roundworms.

2014: British-American John O’Keefe, Edward I. Moser and May-Britt Moser of Norway, for discovering how the brain navigates using an “internal GPS”.

2013: Thomas S. Sudhoff, a German-born US citizen, and James E. Rothman and Randy W. Schackman, US, for their work on how a cell organizes its transport system.

© 2022 AFP