Awards & Winners

Paul Zamecnik

Date of Birth 1912
Place of Birth Cleveland
(United States of America, Ohio, Cuyahoga County, Area code 216)
Nationality United States of America
Also know as Paul C Zamecnik
Profession Inventor, Scientist
Paul Charles Zamecnik was an American scientist who played a central role in the early history of molecular biology. He was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Zamecnik pioneered the in vitro synthesis of proteins and helped elucidate the way cells generate proteins. With Mahlon Hoagland he co-discovered transfer RNA. Through his later work, he is credited as the inventor of antisense therapeutics. Throughout his career, Zamecnik earned over a dozen US patents for his therapeutic techniques. Up until his death in 2009 he maintained a lab at MGH where he studied the application of synthetic oligonucleotides for chemotherapeutic treatment of drug resistant and XDR tuberculosis in his later years.

Awards by Paul Zamecnik

Check all the awards nominated and won by Paul Zamecnik.

1996


Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award
(For brilliant and original science that revolutionized biochemistry and spawned new avenues of scientific inquiry.)

1991


National Medal of Science for Biological Sciences
(For his pioneering research of protein biosynthesis, opening the door to biochemical attack, and paving the way for dissection of the genetic code; and for introducing the concept and method of antisense DNA as an approach to viral gene inhibition and chemotherapy.)