
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 11, 1994                   TAG: 9410120047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN                                LENGTH: Medium

NOBEL IN MEDICINE GOES TO U.S.

Two Americans - one formerly of the University of Virginia - won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for shedding light on how cells communicate to speed the spread of killer diseases like cholera and diabetes throughout the body.

Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell will split the $930,000 prize for determining how a certain group of proteins can help transmit and modulate signals in cells, much like a biological switchboard.

Their discoveries, products of two decades of work, have been ``paramount'' in helping scientists understand diseases that affect tens of millions of people around the globe, said Professor Bertil Fredholm of the Karolinska Institute's Nobel Assembly.

Although the scientists worked separately over the years, Fredholm said ``one handed the baton to the other,'' beginning with Rodbell's research in the late 1960s and continuing with Gilman's from 1975 to 1985.

Rodbell and his team worked at the National Institutes of Health at the time, while Gilman was working at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

While their research, carried out over two decades, has not netted treatments yet, the institute said it ultimately might. The medicine prize was the first of this year's six Nobel awards to be announced. Since 1901, when the first Nobel medicine prize was awarded, 72 of 157 winners have been from the United States, reflecting an American dominance in basic research, especially after World War II.

Rodbell deplored what he called today's emphasis on specific goals at the expense of unfettered basic research.

``The world ain't the same,'' he said at a news conference in suburban Washington, where he was visiting family. ``Now, everything is targeted, bottom line, how to make a buck.''

Rodbell, 68, retired in May from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina because, he said, his basic research budget kept shrinking and he saw there would not be enough money to complete the fiscal year. He now holds the title scientist emeritus.

Gilman, 53, is chairman of the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

by CNB