Awards & Winners

Wolf Prize in Medicine

Wolf Prize

The Wolf Prize in Medicine is awarded once a year by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Arts. The Prize is probably the third most prestigious award in medicine, after the Nobel Prize and the Lasker Award.
Date Established : 1978

Check all the winners of Wolf Prize in Medicine presented under Wolf Prize since 1978 .


Ronald M. Evans

(For his discovery of the gene super-family encoding nuclear receptors and elucidating the mechanism of action of this class of receptors.)

Shinya Yamanaka, Rudolf Jaenisch

(For the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from skin cells (SY) and demonstration that iPS cells can be used to cure genetic disease in a mammal, thus establishing their therapeutic potential (RJ).)

Axel Ullrich

(For his pioneering contributions to the discovery and characterization of human proto-onco-genes and the development of novel cancer therapies.)

Aharon Razin, Howard Cedar

(For their fundamental contributions to our understanding of the role of DNA methylation in the control of gene expression.)

Alexander Levitzki

(For pioneering signal transduction therapy and for developing tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer and a range of other diseases.)

Anthony R. Hunter

(For the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation.)

Anthony Pawson

(For his discovery of protein domains essential for mediating protein-protein interactions in cellular signaling pathways, and the insights this research has provided into cancer.)

Roger Y. Tsien

(For his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction.)

Robert Weinberg

(For his discovery that cancer cells including human tumor cells, carry somatically mutated genes-oncogenes that operate to drive their malignant proliferation.)

Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies

(For their contribution to the development of gene-targeting, enabling elucidation of gene function in mice.)

Ralph L. Brinster

(For the development of procedures to manipulate mouse ova and embryos, which has enabled transgenesis and its applications in mice.)

Avram Hershko, Alexander Varshavsky

(For the discovery of the ubiquitin system of intracellular protein degradation and the crucial functions of this system in cellular regulation.)

Eric Kandel

(For the elucidation of the organismic, cellular and molecular mechanisms whereby short term memory is converted to a long term form.)

Michael Sela, Ruth Arnon

(For their major discoveries in the field of immunology.)

Mary F. Lyon

(For her hypothesis concerning the random inactivation of X-chromosomes in mammals.)

Stanley B. Prusiner

(For discovering prions, new class of pathogens that cause important neurodegenerative disease by inducing changes in protein structute.)

Michael Berridge, Yasutomi Nishizuka

(For their discoveries concerning cellular transmembrane signalling involving phospholipids and calcium.)

Judah Folkman

(For his discoveries which originated the concept and developed the field of angiogenesis research.)

Seymour Benzer

(For having generated a new field of molecular neurogenetics by his pioneering research on the dissection of the nervous system and behavior by gene mutations.)

Maclyn McCarty

(For his part in the demonstration that the transforming factor in bacteria is due to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the concomitant discovery that the genetic material is composed of DNA.)

John Gurdon

(For his introduction of the xenopus oocyte into molecular biology and his demonstration that the nucleus of a differentiated cell and of the egg differ in expression but not in the content of genetic material.)

Edward B. Lewis

(For his demonstration and exploration of the genetic control of the development of body segments by homeotic genes.)

Henri G. Hers, Elizabeth F. Neufeld

(For the biochemical elucidation of lysosomal storage diseases and the resulting contributions to biology, pathology, prenatal diagnosis, and therapeutics.)

Pedro Cuatrecasas, Meir Wilchek

(for the invention and development of affinity chromatography and its applications to biomedical sciences.)

Osamu Hayaishi

(for his discovery of the oxygenase enzymes and elucidation of their structure and biological importance.)

Donald F. Steiner

(for his discoveries concerning the bio-synthesis and processing of insulin which have had profound implications for basic biology and clinical medicine.)

Jean-Pierre Changeux

(for the isolation, purification and characterization of the acetylcholine receptor.)

Solomon H. Snyder

(for the development of the ways to label neurotransmitter receptors which provide tools to describe their properties.)

James Black

(for developing agents which block beta adrenergic and histamine receptors.)

Barbara McClintock

(for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure behaviour and function, and for her identification and description of transposable genetic (mobile) elements.)

Stanley Norman Cohen

(for his concepts underlying genetic engineering; for constructing a biologically functional hybrid plasmid, and for achieving actual expression of a foreign gene implanted in E. coli by the recombinant DNA method.)

César Milstein, Leo Sachs, James Learmonth Gowans

(for their contributions to knowledge of the function and disfunction of the body cells through their studies on the immunological role of the lymphocytes, the development of specific antibodies and the elucidation of mechanisms governing the control and differentiation of normal and cancer cells.)

Roger Wolcott Sperry

(for his studies on the functional differentiation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain.)

Arvid Carlsson

(for his work which established the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter.)

Oleh Hornykiewicz

(for opening a new approach in the control of Parkinson's disease by L-Dopa.)

Jean Dausset

(for discovering the HL-A system, the major histocompatibility complex in man and its primordial role in organ transplantation.)

George Davis Snell

(for discovery of H-2 antigens, which codes for major transplantation antigens and the onset of the immune response.)

Jon J. van Rood

(for his contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the HL-A system in man and its implications in transplantation and in disease.)