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Carlson: Hi, I'm Emily Carlson.
Carlson: It's October second, and we're just days away from finding out who will win the 2007 Nobel Prizes.
Carlson: To tell us more about the prizes honoring basic biomedical research is Dr. Jeremy Berg,
Carlson: director of NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, or NIGMS.
Carlson: Dr. Berg, what kinds of breakthroughs in basic biomedical research are recognized with a Nobel Prize?
Berg: Well sometimes they are for really new discoveries,
Berg: just something that seems to come out of nowhere that really changes the whole landscape.
Berg: So an example of that was researchers looking at how a little worm develops,
Berg: discovered a process of genetically controlled cell death.
Berg: Some cells divide and then die and they have genes that specifically instruct them when to do that.
Berg: This turns out to have huge implications for developmental biology obviously,
Berg: but also cancer, cancer therapy, many other diseases.
Berg: Other Nobel Prizes go to recognize solutions to long-standing problems.
Berg: So problems, which have been around for decades in many times
Berg: and people knew they were of fundamental importance,
Berg: but no one had been able to solve them.
Berg: Other times they go to scientists who have made many,
Berg: many contributions over time which together build a body that has really changed the field.
Berg: One example of the last sort of prize was Professor E.J. Corey who had developed many,
Berg: many synthetic methods over decades
Berg: but also had been one of the real leaders in developing a rational framework for thinking
Berg: about organic synthesis including the development of computer methods
Berg: which are now much more widely used as computers have become much more powerful.
Carlson: NIGMS has supported the prize-winning work of 62 scientists.
Carlson: Why have so many of our grantees won Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine and chemistry?
Berg: Well, NIGMS, very much like the Nobel Foundation takes a very broad view
Berg: of biomedical research and chemical research.
Berg: So while we're supporting research that is relevant to medicine,
Berg: a lot of times it relates to very fundamental processes in cell biology
Berg: or development of new synthetic methods,
Berg: chemical methods, which can be used to explore new molecules for making new drugs and so on.
Berg: This approach has been a very powerful engine for new discoveries.
Berg: So many of the examples which I cited before were discovered because of taking this very broad view,
Berg: rather than being more narrowly focused on things
Berg: where the applications are much clearer from the beginning.
Carlson: Were you surprised that Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won last year's Nobel Prize
Carlson: for their discovery of RNA interference?
Berg: Not really, actually it was predicted by a number of people including myself as a likely winner.
Berg: It's really remarkable, this particular discovery,
Berg: since the work they were cited for was less then a decade old
Berg: and that's remarkably fast on the Nobel time scale or really any other time scale.
Berg: On the other hand it was clear that this was a very special sort of discovery.
Berg: They discovered by looking at,
Berg: or actually really following up a control experiment that didn't work out the way anybody expected,
Berg: they discovered this special role for this whole class of RNA molecules that first off led
Berg: to a whole series of really powerful research tools,
Berg: is leading to the development of completely new approaches to the development of drugs,
Berg: and has uncovered all sorts of biology that no one would have anticipated beforehand.
Berg: On the one hand it's surprising that in less than a decade it was cited,
Berg: on the other hand it was pretty clear to everybody
Berg: that this had such a big impact that it was going to win one day
Berg: and that day might as well be soon given how powerful it was becoming.
Carlson: For more than 25 years, NIGMS has supported the work of Roger Kornberg,
Carlson: who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Carlson: What does this suggest about the pace of scientific discovery
Carlson: and the value of supporting it over time?
Berg: Dr. Kornberg's discovery was of the structure of RNA polymerase was really as you say,
Berg: many decades in the making.
Berg: This was an example of something where the problem was very clear;
Berg: RNA polymerase had been identified back in the '60s
Berg: as being the sort of key enzyme in converting the genetic information into action.
Berg: So it was a very well recognized problem.
Berg: Also enough work had been done that it was clear that it was a very,
Berg: very complicated enzyme.
Berg: And the methods that were available (biochemical, structural, etc.) were just not ready
Berg: to tackle something this complicated.
Berg: But over decades he sort of chipped away at the problem,
Berg: developed new methods, improved things along the way,
Berg: and eventually breakthroughs were made so that he could actually determine
Berg: the structure really at very high resolution
Berg: so we can now get a clear picture of how this enzyme works
Berg: and that lays the foundation for understanding its regulation and many aspects of gene regulation.
Berg: It certainly makes the case that you have to be patient.
Berg: I mean both funding agencies have to be patient;
Berg: scientists have to be tremendously patient.
Berg: It's not as if he was working for 25 years waiting for something to happen,
Berg: there was sort of steady progress along the way
Berg: and people were hopeful that he would eventually get into the end zone and that's what happened.
Carlson: I see you have a signed and sealed envelope.
Carlson: Are those your predictions about who might win the prize this year?
Berg: Indeed they are, it's signed and sealed and we'll see how I do next week.
Berg: I don't want to say too much, but let me just say,
Berg: one of them is for really the invention of a new class of methods,
Berg: a new set of molecules which have had broad impact in cell biology
Berg: and many other areas of biomedical research.
Berg: And the other is for the prediction of and then discovery of a class of molecules
Berg: that play a series of important roles in biology
Berg: and have had a big understanding of the genetic basis of disease.
Berg: So we'll see what happens next week.
Carlson: We will indeed, thank you very much.
Berg: Well, thank you.