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October 07, 2003 Nobel prize for Medicine 2000 The Nobel prize for Medicine has been awarded for research which helped doctors inch towards a treatment for Parkinson's Disease. This disease is a tragic disorder of the nervous system. This year Nobel prize for Medicine has been awarded to a trio
-- for their discoveries concerning how messages are transmitted in the nervous system. The three Nobel laureates made pioneering discoveries concerning one way that brain cells pass messages to each other. Sufferers of Parkinson's include Pope John Paul II, Mohamad Ali and screen actor Micheal J. Fox. Their symptoms were in the form of tremor, slow movement or difficulty in speaking. Among the advance cases of Parkinson's the decline in health is even more terrible to witness. The face becomes expression less because of rigidity. The swallowing becomes less frequent, leading to drooling, Depression, Dementia and death. Working separately the trio made discoveries in to chemical signaling in the brain - the minute substances which are used to send a message from one nerve cell to another. Arvid Carlsson is rewarded for his discovery that dopamine is a transmitter in the brain and that is has great importance for our ability to control movements. Carlsson performed a series of pioneering studies during the late 1950s. Carlsson used a naturally occurring substance, reserpine, which depletes the storage of several synaptic transmitters. He realized that the symptoms caused by reserpine were similar to the syndrome of Parkinson's disease. As a consequence L-dopa was developed as a drug against Parkinson's disease and today is still the most important treatment of the disease. The discoveries of Arvid Carlsson have had great importance for the treatment of depression, which is one of our most common diseases. Paul Greengard is rewarded for his discovery of how dopamine and a number of other transmitters exert their action in the nervous system. Towards the end of the 1960s it was known that dopamine, nonadrenaline and serotonin were transmitters in the central nervous system but knowledge about their mechanism of action was lacking. Greengard discovered how they exert their effects at the synapse. Paul Greengard's discoveries concerning protein phosphorylation have increased our understanding of the mechanism of action of several drugs, which specifically affects phosphorylation of proteins in different nerve cells. Eric Kandel is rewarded for his discoveries of how the efficiency of synapses can be modified, and which molecular mechanisms take part. Kandel started to study learning and memory in mammals, but realized the conditions were too complex ... and therefore decided to investigate a simpler experimental model, the nervous system of a sea slug. With the nervous system of a sea slug ... he has demonstrated how changes of synaptic function are central for learning and memory. Even if the road towards an understanding of complex memory functions still is long, the results of Eric Kandel have provided a critical building stone.
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