NEWS

Scientific Advisory Committee Member Carl Nathan Received 2009 Robert Koch Award

October 2009

Dr. Carl Nathan of Weill Cornell Medical College received the 2009 Robert Koch Award on October 30 in Germany.

Dr. Nathan is a 1984 Rita Allen Foundation (RAF) Scholar and currently serves as a member of the Rita Allen Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee. He is also chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, director of the Abby and Howard P. Milstein Program in Chemical Biology, professor of medicine, and the R.A. Rees Pritchett Professor of Microbiology at Weill Cornell.

Dr. Nathan is renowned as one of the world’s experts in antibacterial infection defense. His research has shown that defense cells in the immune system attack body-penetrating bacteria with various chemicals, including nitric oxide, and he has clarified how tuberculosis bacteria escape this bombardment. Just recently, he was honored with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the genetic mechanism by which tuberculosis emerges from its latent state into an infectious and symptomatic disease.

At €100,000, the annual Robert Koch Prize is one of the most highly endowed scientific awards in Germany. Sponsored by the Robert Koch Foundation, which is under the patronage of the President of Germany and dedicated to promoting basic research into infectious diseases and other widespread infirmities, the prize is named after the scientist who was one of the founders of modern bacteriology. Robert Koch (1843 to 1910) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his tuberculosis findings in 1905.

Since 1970, the Robert Koch Foundation has awarded honors for major advances in the biomedical sciences, particularly in the fields of microbiology and immunology. The prestige of this award has grown so that it is now widely regarded as a leading international scientific prize. The Robert Koch Prize for a major discovery in biomedical science is commonly considered one of the stepping-stones to eventual Nobel Prize recognition for scientists in the fields of microbiology and immunology, and a number of Koch Prize winners have subsequently become Nobel laureates.