Gairdner Awards Research Articles

Celebrating scientific excellence and global health impact: The 2022 Canada Gairdner Awards

From mRNA vaccines to community interventions in global child health, the 2022 Canada Gairdner awards demonstrate the importance of fundamental science and its translation into improved human health and well-being.

Editing Humanity

Kevin Davies’s Editing Humanity takes you on a dizzying tour of CRISPR, from its discovery and naming by little-known Spanish microbiologist Francisco Mojica 25 years ago to the births of Lulu and Nana, the world’s first genetically edited humans. It took 13 years for the Human Genome Project to sequence the 3 billion bases in the human genome for the first time. Using a technique called micropore sequencing, you can now have yours done in less than 24 hours.Along the ride, you learn first about how CRISPR (clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats) and its associated enzyme Cas-9 can be used to insert, modify, or delete DNA sequences in almost any organism. Although the system is an antiviral memory-enhanced immune system in bacteria, it can be used in almost any organism, since we all share the same basic DNA systems.The best-known researchers in this field include Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, and George Church and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who currently hold the patents for most applications of the technique. A PhD in molecular genetics, Davies clearly explains the workings of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, using several colored diagrams, as well as the ongoing legal battles that will determine who will ultimately control the multibillion-dollar rights to a prokaryotic immune system.And the ride also goes worldwide. Davies brings you into interviews he does in Boston, Banff, Oslo, Singapore, Alicante, Vilnius, and Toronto, among many more. There are several reasons why I liked this book more than the four others I’ve read about CRISPR in the past two years. He explains the science without talking down to the reader. Yet he also explains the people. While in Toronto covering the Gairdner Awards (the “Nobel Prize” of Canada), Doudna and Charpentier share the award with a certain American epidemiologist named Anthony Fauci.Although most researchers (and legally some countries, including the USA) in this rapidly changing field maintain a moratorium on editing the human germ line, Chinese researcher He Jiankui, educated at Rice and Harvard, was the first to breach this barrier in 2018 with CRISPRd twin girls. He modified the CCR5 co-receptor for HIV, with the goal of making them immune to AIDS. Whether it really worked and whether there were additional off-site edits is still unknown. The uproar in the scientific world embarrassed the Chinese government, and Jiankui is currently in what amounts to house arrest, even though it is widely believed that the government knew exactly what was going on, turning a mostly blind eye. Many also believe that the Chinese will not allow such a gifted man to stay on the shelf for long, and in exchange for not naming officials in China who were complicit, Jiankui will be rehabilitated in the next few years.In the last few chapters, we learn about additional techniques, possibly more precise than the find-and-replace-all CRISPR, such as TALENs, ZFN, and single base editing. As microbiologist Fyodor Urnov wrote, “We live in an age where there is such a thing as Microsoft Word for human DNA. The cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle.

Understanding the human brain: A lifetime of dedicated pursuit

As a pioneer in the field of neuropsychology, Dr. Brenda Milner has contributed to many important landmark discoveries in the study of memory and temporal lobes, the lateralization of hemispheric function in language, as well as the role of frontal lobes in problem-solving. She is a fellow of the Royal Society (London) and the Royal Society of Canada, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). She has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards throughout her career, the latest of which include the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award in 2001, the Neuroscience Award from the United States National Academy of Science in 2004 and the Gairdner Award in 2005. Dr. Milner received her undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge in 1939 and completed her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Donald Hebb at McGill University in 1952. She joined the Montreal Neurological Institute in 1950 to work with Dr. Wilder Penfield. Dr. Milner is presently the Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery of McGill University. I spent an afternoon with Dr. Milner on May 12th, 2006, where she shared with me her thoughts on her work, her perspective on the past and future of cognitive neuroscience, as well as her advice for students beginning in research.

Canada Gairdner Awards 2020: A Tightly Woven Tapestry of Discovery

Canada Gairdner Awards 2020: A Tightly Woven Tapestry of Discovery

Gairdner award winner recognized for sharing his techniques.

His protein visualization tools have impressed his colleagues, but it was Lewis Kay’s decision to share his methods with the scientific community that earned him the 2017 Canada Gairdner International Award. “He’s always been very, very good at sharing these techniques with other scientists

Canada Gairdner Awards honour exceptional medical research

The Gairdner Foundation has announced the eight star researchers from around the world who will receive the 2014 Canada Gairdner Awards, Canada’s most prestigious prize for biomedical research. The winners, who will each receive $100 000, were honoured for their innovative contributions to various

The road not taken or how I learned to love the liver: A personal perspective on hepatitis history

The road not taken or how I learned to love the liver: A personal perspective on hepatitis history

Bibliometric analysis of Nobelists’ awards and landmark papers in physiology or medicine during 1983–2012

Aim. This study's purpose was to determine if there was a relationship between Nobel Laureates’ awards and landmark papers and winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine during 1983–2012.Methods. The 66 Nobelists’ awards and landmark papers in the period 1983–2012 were analyzed.Results. The results showed that the most Nobelists had won Gairdner, Lasker, Howitz or Wolf Award before they won Nobel Prize, indicating that Gairdner Award may be considered as a Nobel Prize’s wind vane. A small number of landmark papers were indeed published in low impact factor journals (10.5% below impact factor 5.0) and some of their citation were low (23.2% below 400 times). There were 61 of 76 landmark papers published in the journals of JCR partition 1, reaching 80%, but 2 of 76 landmark papers were even outside of JCR partition, demonstrating that JCR partition acts as a reciprocal supplement with impact factor and citation times. The test period of Nobel Prize was substantially between 10 to 30 years. There were 5 persons whose landmark papers were cited all above 6000 times to get Nobel Prize within the test period of ten years, suggesting that there is a trend of certain inverse ratio between the citation and the test period of Nobel Prize.Conclusion. These findings provide a new insight into the relationship among Nobel Laureates’ awards, landmark papers and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Offline: 41 Portland Place

You surely have to be intelligent to be a good scientist. But at a recent reception, hosted by James R Wright, Canada's High Commissioner in London, to celebrate the 2010 Canada Gairdner Awards, Peter Ratcliffe disagreed: “confidence is important…you don't need to be intelligent”. Ratcliffe won his Gairdner for discovering the mechanism of hypoxic sensing in cells. There are many good reasons for not doing experiments, he said. It is confidence, not intelligence, that overcomes those reasons. Nick White was also a Gairdner winner, receiving his award for work on artemisinin.

Nicholas White—winner of 2010 Gairdner Global Health Award

Nicholas White—winner of 2010 Gairdner Global Health Award

Minds That Matter: 2007 Gairdner International Awards Lectures

On October 25 and 26, 2007, at the University of Toronto, the Gairdner Foundation in partnership with Canadian Institutes of Health Research presented a two-day international symposium titled Minds That Matter. The symposium featured academic lectures by Gairdner Award winners past and present and by other leading biomedical scientists. These distinguished researchers share many characteristics in common: creativity, vision, tenacity, and driving curiosity to illuminate discovery with high degree of relevance. The present article summarizes the 2007 Gairdner Award lectures.

Yale biophysicist Thomas Steitz receives Gairdner Award for medical research

Yale biophysicist Thomas Steitz receives Gairdner Award for medical research

Measuring revolutionary biomedical science 1992–2006 using Nobel prizes, Lasker (clinical medicine) awards and Gairdner awards (NLG metric)

The Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, the Lasker award for clinical medicine, and the Gairdner international award are given to individuals for their role in developing theories, technologies and discoveries which have changed the direction of biomedical science. These distinctions have been used to develop an NLG metric to measure research performance and trends in 'revolutionary' biomedical science with the aim of identifying the premier revolutionary science research institutions and nations from 1992-2006. I have previously argued that the number of Nobel laureates in the biomedical field should be expanded to about nine per year and the NLG metric attempts to predict the possible results of such an expansion. One hundred and nineteen NLG prizes and awards were made during the past fifteen years (about eight per year) when overlapping awards had been removed. Eighty-five were won by the USA, revealing a massive domination in revolutionary biomedical science by this nation; the UK was second with sixteen awards; Canada had five, Australia four and Germany three. The USA had twelve elite centres of revolutionary biomedical science, with University of Washington at Seattle and MIT in first position with six awards and prizes each; Rockefeller University and Caltech were jointly second placed with five. Surprisingly, Harvard University--which many people rank as the premier world research centre--failed to reach the threshold of three prizes and awards, and was not included in the elite list. The University of Oxford, UK, was the only institution outside of the USA which featured as a significant centre of revolutionary biomedical science. Long-term success at the highest level of revolutionary biomedical science (and probably other sciences) probably requires a sufficiently large number of individually-successful large institutions in open competition with one another--as in the USA. If this model cannot be replicated within smaller nations, then it implies that such arrangements need to be encouraged and facilitated in multi-national units.

Q & A

Alexander Varshavsky is Smits Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He moved to Caltech in 1992, after 15 years at the MIT's Department of Biology. He was born and educated in Russia, and was 30 at the time of his emigration to the U.S. in 1977. In Russia, and for a while at MIT, he studied the structure and replication of chromosomes. Over the last 24 years, the work of his laboratory focused on the ubiquitin system and closely related fields. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Gairdner Award, the Lasker Award, the General Motors Sloan Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Horwitz Prize, and the Wilson Medal.