Most Recent 10 Nobel's Prizes for Medicine or Physiology

1. 2018-  James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo for Immune checkpoint therapy to treatments for advanced, deadly cancers.
2. 2017- Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for unravelling how bodies keep a circadian rhythm or body clock
3. 2016 - Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering how cells remain healthy by recycling waste.
4. 2015 - William C Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura and Youyou Tu for anti-parasite drug discoveries.
5. 2014 - John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for discovering the brain's navigating system.
6. 2013 - James Rothman, Randy Schekman, and Thomas Sudhof for their discovery of how cells precisely transport material.
7. 2012 - Two pioneers of stem cell research - John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka - were awarded the Nobel after changing adult cells into stem cells.
8. 2011 - Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffmann and Ralph Steinman shared the prize after revolutionising the understanding of how the body fights infection.
9. 2010 - Robert Edwards for devising the fertility treatment IVF which led to the first "test tube baby" in July 1978.
10. 2009 - Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for finding the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes.

2018 Nobel prize for medicine or Physiology goes to immune checkpoint therapy

Two scientists who discovered how to fight cancer using the body's immune system have won the 2018 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

The work, by Professor James P Allison from the US and Professor Tasuku Honjo from Japan, has led to treatments for advanced, deadly skin cancer.

Immune checkpoint therapy has revolutionised cancer treatment, said the prize-giving Swedish Academy.

Experts say it has proved to be "strikingly effective".

Prof Allison, of the University of Texas, and Prof Honjo, of Kyoto University, will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor - about $1.01 million or 870,000 euros.

Accepting the prize, Tasuku Honjo told reporters: "I want to continue my research ... so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever."

Prof Allison said: "It's a great, emotional privilege to meet cancer patients who've been successfully treated with immune checkpoint blockade. They are living proof of the power of basic science, of following our urge to learn and to understand how things work."

Treating the untreatable

Our immune system protects us from disease, but it has built-in safeguards to stop it from attacking our own tissue.

Some cancers can take advantage of those "brakes" and dodge the attack too.

Allison and Honjo, now both in their 70s, discovered a way to unleash our immune cells to attack tumours by turning off proteins that put the brakes on.

And that led to the development of new drugs which now offer hope to patients with advanced and previously untreatable cancer.

Immune checkpoint therapy is being used by the NHS to treat people with the most serious form of skin cancer, melanoma.

It doesn't work for everyone, but for some patients it appears to have worked incredibly well, getting rid of the tumour entirely, even after it had started to spread around the body.

Such remarkable results had never been seen before for patients like these.

Doctors have also been using the treatment to help some people with advanced lung cancer.

Prof Charles Swanton, from Cancer Research UK, congratulated the prize winners, saying: "Thanks to this groundbreaking work, our own immune system's innate power against cancer has been realised and harnessed into treatments that continue to save the lives of patients. For cancers such as advanced melanoma, lung, and kidney, these immune-boosting drugs have transformed the outlook for many patients who had run out of options.

"The booming field of immunotherapy that these discoveries have precipitated is still relatively in its infancy, so it's exciting to consider how this research will progress in the future and what new opportunities will arise."

Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year.

The literature prize will not be handed out this year, after the awarding body was affected by a sexual misconduct scandal.

By Michelle RobertsHealth editor, BBC News online

Biodiversity worsens all over the world, in urgency to cope with

An intergovernmental ecological body said on Friday that the biodiversity, the essential variety of life forms on Earth, continued to decline in every region of the world, significantly reducing nature’s capacity to contribute to people’s well-being.

Those alarming trends are endangering economies, livelihoods, food security and the quality of life of people everywhere, according to four peer-reviewed regional reports released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Human-induced climate change, which affects temperature, precipitation and the nature of extreme events, is increasingly driving biodiversity loss and the reduction of nature’s contributions to people, said Jake Rice, a co-chair of the Americas assessment.

In the Americas, the populations of species are about 31 percent smaller than those was at the time of European colonization, according the report. With the growing effects of climate change added to the other drivers, this loss is projected to reach 40 percent by 2050, it says.

In Africa, by 2100, climate change could also result in the loss of more than half of African bird and mammal species, a 20 to 30 percent decline in the productivity of Africa’s lakes and significant loss of African plant species.

The most recent sad example went to the death of the world’s only remaining male northern white rhino in Kenya on Monday. Its death left only two female northern white rhinos on the planet.

There have been some good news in Asia, however. Over the past 25 years, marine protected areas in the region increased by almost 14 percent and terrestrial protected area by 0.3 percent. Its forest coverage increased by 2.5 percent, with the highest increases in North East Asia (22.9 percent) and by South Asia (5.8 percent).

But the report considered those efforts in Asia insufficient to halt the loss of biodiversity. Unsustainable aquaculture practices, overfishing and destructive harvesting, threaten coastal and marine ecosystems, with projections that, if current fishing practices continue, there will be no exploitable fish stocks in the region by 2048.

Also in Asia, intertidal zones are also rapidly deteriorating due to human activities as up to 90 percent of corals will suffer severe degradation by 2050, even under conservative climate change scenarios.

In the European Union, only 7 percent of marine species and 9 percent of marine habitat types have shown a “favorable conservation status.” Moreover 27 percent of species assessments and 66 percent of habitat types assessments show an “unfavorable conservation status.”

“One of the most important findings across the four IPBES regional assessments is that failure to prioritize policies and actions to stop and reverse biodiversity loss, and the continued degradation of nature’s contributions to people,” said Anne Larigauderie, the Executive Secretary of IPBES.

“Tools like these four regional assessments provide scientific evidence for better decision making and a path we can take forward to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and harness nature’s power for our collective sustainable future,” said Achim Steiner, Administrator of United Nations Development Program.

Clues to aging found in stem cells' genomes

Stem cells that produce sperm use a genetic trick to stay perpetually young across generations, researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) Life Sciences Institute have discovered.

The results have been newly reported in the journal eLife.

Certain sections of the fruit fly genome get shorter with age. But remarkably, some reproductive cells can repair the shrinkage, and this genomic shrinkage may underlie aspects of aging and hint at ways that select cells might thwart it.

In the study, UM researchers focused on workhorse genes encoded in ribosomal DNA, or rDNA. These genes carry instructions for the parts that make up ribosomes, cellular machines that turn RNA molecules into every protein needed in the body.

In fruit flies, chains of rDNA genes are found on the X and Y chromosomes. Compared with young male fruit flies, old males had a shortage of rDNA genes on the Y chromosome, leaving them with a shrunken Y chromosome.

Moreover, this dearth of rDNA seems to be passed on from generation to generation. Geriatric fly fathers, those 40 days old, passed on their reduced number of rDNA genes to their sons, UM researchers found. These sons had considerably fewer copies of rDNA genes than sons born to younger fathers.

Then the researchers saw something surprising. In many cases, this rDNA loss reversed itself. At about 10 days of age, sons born to old fathers had recovered enough rDNA to be comparable to sons born to young fathers.

"This recovery was something we really didn't expect," said UM Life Sciences Institute faculty member Yukiko Yamashita.

The results suggest that rDNA rejuvenation in sons might be a crucial aspect of how stem cells persist from father to son. The researchers do not yet know whether such a reset can happen to female stem cells in the ovaries.

Until now, researchers had observed the phenomenon only in yeast. If the results hold true for humans, they could offer insight into how most cells deteriorate over time.

Being pushed, Yamashita would wager that some types of immortal cells in people can perform the same rejuvenating trick to prevent the rDNA declines that come with age.

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DNA Cloning

In biology a clone is a group of individual cells or organisms descended from one progenitor. This means that the members of a clone are genetically identical, because cell replication produces identical daughter cells each time. The use of the word clone has been extended to recombinant DNA technology, which has provided scientists with the ability to produce many copies of a single fragment of DNA, such as a gene, creating identical copies that constitute a DNA clone. In practice the procedure is carried out by inserting a DNA fragment into a small DNA molecule and then allowing this molecule to replicate inside a simple living cell such as a bacterium. The small replicating molecule is called a DNA vector (carrier). The most commonly used vectors are plasmids (circular DNA molecules that originated from bacteria), viruses, and yeast cells. Plasmids are not a part of the main cellular genome, but they can carry genes that provide the host cell with useful properties, such as drug resistance, mating ability, and toxin production. They are small enough to be conveniently manipulated experimentally, and, furthermore, they will carry extra DNA that is spliced into them.

Recombinant DNA technology

Recombinant DNA technology, joining together of DNA molecules from two different species that are inserted into a host organism to produce new genetic combinations that are of value to science, medicine, agriculture, and industry. Since the focus of all genetics is the gene, the fundamental goal of laboratory geneticists is to isolate, characterize, and manipulate genes. Although it is relatively easy to isolate a sample of DNA from a collection of cells, finding a specific gene within this DNA sample can be compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Consider the fact that each human cell contains approximately 2 metres (6 feet) of DNA. Therefore, a small tissue sample will contain many kilometres of DNA. However, recombinant DNA technology has made it possible to isolate one gene or any other segment of DNA, enabling researchers to determine its nucleotide sequence, study its transcripts, mutate it in highly specific ways, and reinsert the modified sequence into a living organism.