Israelis, American Win Nobel for Chemistry

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose won the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for discovering a key way cells destroy unwanted proteins — starting with a chemical "kiss of death."

Their work provides the basis for developing new therapies for diseases such as cervical cancer and cystic fibrosis.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Ciechanover, 57, Hershko, 67, and Rose, 78, for work they did in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Each human cell contains about 100,000 different proteins, busy bees that carry out jobs like speeding up chemical reactions and acting as signals. At least five Nobel prizes have been given for research into how cells make proteins, but the question of how they destroy proteins has received much less attention, the assembly said.

The three scientists uncovered a process that starts when a doomed protein is grabbed by a particular molecule, marking it for destruction. Such marked proteins are then chopped to pieces.

The process governs such key processes as cell division, DNA repair and quality control of newly produced proteins, as well as important parts of the body's immune defenses against disease, the academy said in its citation.

Scientists are trying to use the process to create medicines, either to prevent the breakdown of proteins or make the cell destroy disease-causing ones. One example is the cancer drug Velcade, approved last year in the United States, which interferes with the cell's protein-chopping machine.

Many other drugs that harness the protein-destroying process are in development, said Ciechanover, who is director of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel. Hershko, originally from Hungary, is a professor there.

Rose is a specialist at the department of physiology and biophysics at the college of medicine at the University of California, Irvine.

Ciechanover told reporters, "I'm happy that I can speak on the phone at all and that I remember I my English. I'm not myself, that's for sure, not for a while."

It's the first time an Israeli has won a Nobel science prize, although Israelis have won peace and literature Nobels. "I am as proud for myself as I am for my country," Ciechanover said.

The prizes, which include a $1.3 million check, a gold medal and a diploma, are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.