To Stockholm, with Love

The Swedes garner a passel of Lasher prizes

The annual prizes given by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation have become the most prestigious awards in American medicine--not so much because of what they pay but because of what they promise. Twenty-eight of the recipients have gone on to Stockholm and collected Nobel prizes. Now the imbalance is being corrected a little. Last week the 1977 Lasker prizes were given to five medical scientists, all but one of them Swedes.

The $15,000 award for basic medical research was shared by Drs. K. Sune Bergstroem and Bengt Samuelsson, both of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, and Pharmacologist John R. Vane of Britain's Wellcome Research Laboratories. The three men were honored for their pioneering work in identifying and isolating prostaglandins. First thought to be produced only by the prostate gland--hence the name--prostaglandins are in fact manufactured and found everywhere in the body. They are like hormones and appear to regulate a wide variety of basic life functions, from controlling the clotting of blood and secretion of gastric acid to inducing labor in pregnant women. In the future, such chemicals may be used in treating many different ailments.

The $15,000 prize for clinical medical research went to Dr. Inge G. Edler, chief of cardiology at University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, and Biophysicist C. Hellmuth Hertz of the Lund Institute of Technology. Their pioneering accomplishment: the application of ultrasonics to diagnosing abnormalities of the heart. Hailed by the Lasker jurors as perhaps the most important nonsurgical tool for heart diagnosis since the development of the electrocardiograph, the technique uses the familiar sonar echo principle: high-frequency (and inaudible) sound waves reflected from a target reveal its characteristics. Echocardiography can, for example, measure heart-muscle thickness, detect valve abnormalities and even show an image of the heart pumping on a TV screen--all without surgery or other invasive techniques

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.