Winners of the Lasker Award were announced today. The 2007 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research is presented to Ralph M. Steinman for the discovery of dendritic cells—the preeminent component of the immune system that initiates and regulates the body's response to foreign antigens.
The 2007 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research is presented to Alain Carpentier and Albert Starr for the development of prosthetic mitral and aortic valves, which have prolonged and enhanced the lives of millions of people with heart disease.
The 2007 Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service in Support of Medical Research and the Health Sciences is presented to Anthony S. Fauci for his role as the principal architect of two major U.S. governmental programs, one aimed at AIDS and the other at biodefense.
The Lasker Awards were inaugurated in the years following World War II by philanthropists Albert and Mary Woodard Lasker, and were named in his honor. After Albert Lasker's death in 1953, Mrs. Lasker continued as the guiding force behind the Awards. She also was a dominant figure in the five-decade quest to secure public support for medical research funding in America. Mrs. Lasker died in 1994, leaving as her major legacy a lifetime of powerful influence on health and science in America, in large part through her remarkable efforts to expand support for the National Institutes of Health.
In creating the Lasker Awards for Basic and Clinical Medical Research and Public Service, the Laskers sought to raise public awareness of the enormous value of biomedical research to a healthy society. The Lasker Awards focus keen attention each year on an elite community of remarkable basic and clinical scientists whose work has been seminal to understanding disease and the human being's capacity to overcome it. Year after year, recipients of the Lasker Awards also are honored with the Nobel Prize for Physiology, Medicine or Chemistry. Since 1962, Seventy-one Lasker Award recipients have gone on to win a Nobel Prize, most within two years of receiving the Lasker Award.
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