Nobel Winners Highlight Discovery
By JIM HEINTZ
12/07/98
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - The winners of this year's Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday eagerly told of the explosive interest in their discovery and tried to dampen controversy over whether another researcher should have received the prize.
Americans Louis Ignarro, Robert Furchgott and Ferid Murad are sharing the 7.6-million kronor ($950,000) prize for discovering that the body uses nitric oxide gas to make blood vessels relax and widen, a finding that helped lead to Viagra .
"I've been involved in research for about 30 years, and I've never seen another area explode as this one has," Ignarro told a news conference. "There's so many new areas to explore with nitric oxide. ... Very soon, we'll be able to deal with the causes and novel therapeutic strategies for coronary artery disease, for hypertension, for stroke, for vascular complications with diabetes."
Murad said he believed nitric oxide could soon be applied to relieving asthma suffering.
After the prize was announced in October, the decision to recognize the importance of nitric oxide was widely approved of. But some said Salvador Moncada should have been one of the laureates.
Criticism came from Cesar Millstein, winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize in medicine, and the medical faculty of Moncada's alma mater, the University of El Salvador.
Eduardo Espinoza, dean of the University of El Salvador's medical faculty, said Salvador Moncada made the discovery six months before the U.S. researchers.
Moncada, now at the Wolfson Institute of the University College of London, was quoted last week in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet as saying the prize was a shock.
"I feel terrifically frustrated about the injustice. It feels as if my life's work has been stolen from me," the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Asked about the controversy, Ignarro said the Nobel committee did its "homework," but he praised Moncada as "a brilliant scientist who has made some contributions to this area."
Those who select the various Nobel Prize winners are bound not to comment on their decisions, other than to state in citations why they believe the winners are deserving.
All the Nobel Prizes will be presented Thursday, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who established the prizes in his will.
This year's peace prize will be awarded to John Hume and David Trimble for their peace efforts in Northern Ireland. Jose Saramago of Portugal won the literature prize. The economics prize goes to Amartya Sen for his work in analyzing the causes behind famines and other work in the area of welfare economics.
Robert Laughlin, Horst Stormer and Daniel Tsui share the physics prize for discovering how electrons can change behavior. The chemistry prize, for developing ways of analyzing molecules in reactions, is shared by John Pople and Walter Kohn.
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