Americans win Nobel chemistry prize
Americans Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of proteins that let body cells respond to signals from the outside.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two researchers had made groundbreaking discoveries on an important family of receptors, known as G-protein-coupled receptors.
About half of all medications act on these receptors, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs.
The Nobel week started on Monday with the medicine prize going to stem cell pioneers Sir John Gurdon from Britain and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka. Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland won the physics prize yesterday for work on quantum particles.
The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of 19th century Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.
