Are Canadians Stockholm-bound for Nobel Prize?

Experts touted them as favourites. The top scientists in their field lobbied on their behalf.

They were praised by dozens of the prominent researchers they helped mentor in this city, all of whom insisted the honour was long overdue.

And at 5:30 a.m., Drs. Ernest McCulloch and James Till would have discovered if this was the year they finally received the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The fathers of modern stem-cell research, whose seminal studies in the early 1960s revealed and defined the protean builders of all body tissues, Till and McCulloch would be the first Canadians to win the medicine prize since 1923, when Drs. Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod brought it to this country for their discovery of insulin.

Other potential winners included long-standing U.S. hopefuls Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their enzyme research. The trio’s discovery of the telomerases enzyme set the stage for research suggesting that cancer cells use telomerase to sustain their uncontrolled growth.

In Toronto, colleagues and friends at Princess Margaret Hospital, which absorbed the pair’s Ontario Cancer Institute home in the 1980s, spent the weekend in suspense, hoping the Swedish Nobel committee would tap the duo. – Healthzone.ca

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