The American biologists Bonnie L. Bassler, Jeffrey I. Gordon and Peter Greenberg , whose studies of microorganisms allowed them to work on new therapies and treatments against resistant bacteria , were recognized on June 7 in Spain with the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research 2023.
The research of Gordon, a pioneer in the study of microorganisms that live in the body, and Bassler and Greenberg, who have investigated the communication mechanisms between bacteria, have given rise to "new effective treatments against antibiotic-resistant bacteria" , indicated the jury’s ruling announced in Oviedo, reported the AFP agency.
"Their contributions" in the scientific field gave rise to "new approaches that recognize the essential role of communities of microorganisms in life on Earth, including that of human beings," detailed the ruling of the Princess of Asturias Foundation.
Gordon dedicated himself to studying the tens of billions of microorganisms present in the human intestine and their relationship with health and diseases, such as obesity or diabetes, as well as with "the neurological and immune development" of young people, the note explained. of the foundation’s press release.
Professor of Medicine and Biological Chemistry at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, and director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology of said university, he was the promoter of the so-called Human Microbiome Project, which made it possible to identify the species that live within of humans and sequence the genome of more than a hundred of them.
Bassler and Greenberg, for their part, carried out pioneering studies, separately, on the "communication" between bacteria through certain substances, which made it possible to understand the mechanism and develop molecules that interfere with this communication and thus open a way to develop treatments against bacteria. resistant to antibiotics.
Bassler is chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and Greenberg is a professor of Microbiology at the University of Washington. This candidacy for the award was chosen among 40 applications from 16 nationalities.
Established in 1981, the Princess of Asturias is endowed with 50,000 euros (about $55,000) and a sculpture created by the late Catalan artist Joan Miró.
The Scientific and Technical Research Award is the seventh of the eight awards in this edition of the awards, considered the most prestigious in the Ibero-American world, which are awarded annually, and at the rate of one per week, by the Princess of Asturias Foundation.
Last year, in this category, recognition went to the Frenchman Yann LeCun, the Canadian Yoshua Bengio and the British Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis, pioneers in artificial intelligence and its application in everyday life.
In other editions, awards were also given to scientists responsible for the discovery of messenger RNA, which allowed several vaccines against Covid-19 to be developed in record time, or to mathematicians who promoted mathematical data processing.
For the moment, the awards already announced for the 2023 edition have been the Princess of Asturias for the Arts, which went to the American actress Meryl Streep, the Humanities award, which distinguished the Italian professor, writer and philosopher Nuccio Ordine, and the of Social Sciences, which awarded the French historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse.
Also failed were the Sports Award, which was won by the Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge, the Letters Award, which went to the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and last week the International Cooperation Award, which was awarded by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi, for its acronym in English). On June 14, the announcements for this edition will conclude, with the ruling of the Princess of Asturias of Concordia.
The awards, which take their name from the title of the heir to the throne of the Spanish Crown, Princess Leonor, are presented by Kings Felipe and Letizia, usually accompanied by their daughters, in October at a ceremony in Oviedo, capital of Asturias.
