When US scientist William Kaelin’s phone began ringing at 5:00 am, he wasn’t sure whether he was dreaming: Winning the Nobel Medicine Prize had long been a goal, but he also thought it was a long shot.
He then noticed the caller ID was from Europe, “And at that point my heart started racing,” the 61-year-old told AFP in an interview.
Kaelin, who runs a laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and is a professor at Harvard Medical School, was honored Monday along with fellow American Gregg Semenza and Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe for their research on how cells sense and adapt to changing oxygen levels.
Their pioneering work, carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s, has opened up new strategies to fight diseases from cancer to anemia.
Kaelin said it would be a lie to say he had never dreamt of winning the prize, but “you try not to let it distort your daily life significantly,” and he went to bed at a normal time Sunday night, tempering his hopes, as he had done for many years on the eve of Nobel week.
Semenza on the other hand missed the first first pre-dawn call from the Swedish academy, and waited several anxious minutes by the phone, answering it second time around.
“I was in a daze,” he said, adding he had not been expecting the honor but had since celebrated with champagne.
– Disease cures –
At the heart of the trio’s research is how the body registers and responds to oxygen, which supports life as we know it on Earth.
Scientists have long known that climbing to high altitudes spurs production of the hormone erythropoietin (EPO), which in turn leads to more red blood cells, to help compensate for lower oxygen levels.
Semenza and Ratcliffe dug into how this gene worked on a cellular level, with the former publishing breakthrough work on the subject 1995.
Kaelin came to the same subject from a different direction, through his investigations into von Hippel-Lindau’s disease (VHL disease).
Individuals who inherit this rare condition develop tumors that over produce the distress signal associated with hypoxia — making it a prime candidate to study the body’s oxygen-regulation tools.
