The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine includes former Gairdner Lecturer, Gregg Semenza.
This year’s prize was awarded jointly to William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” They identified molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen.
Semenza received the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2010 and was the Gairdner lecturer at the University of Guelph the same year. Since 2003 he has been the Director of the Vascular Research Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering.
This is not the first time a Gairdner Lecturer has been awarded the Nobel Prize. In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. Ohsumi was the Gairdner lecturer in 2015.
The Canada Gairdner Awards recognize the world’s most creative and accomplished biomedical scientists who are advancing humanity and the world.