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Joan Argetsinger Steitz, a research scientist at Yale University, a pioneer in the field of genetics and a champion of gender equality in science, received the Lasker-Koshland Special Award 2018 in Medical Science.
The award, one of the most esteemed awards in biomedicine, was announced Tuesday by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. It has a fee of $ 250,000 and will be presented Friday in New York.
Steitz, 77, has spent his career exploring the treatment of RNA – how cells send and receive the messages needed to perform most of the basic tasks of life. His first breakthrough in 1968 in redefining the study of RNA biology still gives today promising clues in the development of life-saving drugs.
Through all this, Steitz worked to break the barriers she faced as a girl who loved chemistry and biology, a woman who wanted to work, and finally a female scientist determined to run her own laboratory.
"I think I've always felt you need to be better than men and that's true for all women, I think," Steitz said in an interview with the Lasker Foundation. "And that will be true as long as this fraction is not 50-50. And that's not fair and that's where we have to fight. "
Thirteen years ago, she co-authored a report from the National Academy of Sciences entitled "Beyond Prejudice and Obstacles: Realizing the Potential of Women in University Science and Engineering".
It was a call to action for institutions across the country to recognize the systemic limitations imposed on women, the prevalence of unconscious bias and the need to forge a fair and inclusive future.
For years, Steitz has regularly counseled students about the prejudices they may encounter and how to progress despite them.
Steitz's support for scientific work also extends beyond women, to include all young scientists.
In her own laboratory, she often forgave her ego and removed her name from articles her postdoctoral researchers obtained independently of her.
Of the 360 papers to leave his laboratory, 60 are missing from the name of Steitz.
She has also been President of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for more than a decade, helping to provide funding to young postdoctoral researchers studying cancers and other life-threatening diseases.
"I hope to have made a reasonable contribution to the science that I love and be known as a reasonable person," Steitz told the foundation. "What more can i say?"
Early in his career, Steitz earned a Ph.D. James Watson, a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, worked at Harvard University and worked at his partner's laboratory, Francis Crick, at the University of Cambridge in England.
It's there that she has identified a class of molecules called small nuclear ribonucleoproteins – or snRNPs – that act as splitters for RNA messengers, which carry genetic information bundles with the genes. instructions for the construction of new proteins.
SnRNPs edit these messages to create precise instructions for each cell. After years, Steitz has not only cracked on the workings of these snRNPs, an essential discovery in the field of genetics, but has also explored the relationship between these particles and the immune system.
She then won the National Science Medal in 1986, honorary doctorates at Princeton, Brown, Columbia and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 2014, she was a member of the Royal Society of London, a scientific academy founded in London in 1660.
Professor Sterling of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University was also inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 2008 and won the Connecticut Science Medal, the highest scientific distinction of the year. 39, State in 2015.
Steitz was one of four scientists recognized by Lasker on Tuesday.
Michael Grunstein, UCLA, and C. David Allis, of Rockefeller University, received the Fundamental Research Award for studying histone, a type of protein that packs and controls the # 39; DNA.
The structures that histones form play a key role not only in the expression of genes, but also in hereditary diseases and the development of tumors.
John B. Glen, anesthetist veterinarian in Scotland, won the Lasker Clinical Award for the development of propofol induction anesthesia.
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