Word: bergstr
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When Swedish Chemist Sune Bergström started to do research on prostaglandin in 1947, almost nothing was known about the hormone-like substance, which had been discovered barely a decade earlier by his compatriot, Ulf S. von Euler. Even the name of the substance was based on the false assumption that it originates in the prostate gland. Over the next 35 years, with Bergström leading the way, researchers discovered that prostaglandin (PG) is not one chemical but a whole family of substances found in almost every tissue of the body. PGS, it was learned, are extraordinarily versatile...
...Bergström's explorations of this virgin territory earned him the sobriquet "father of prostaglandin chemistry" and last week an even greater honor, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The 66-year-old Swede shared the award and $157,500 with two other pioneers of PG research: Bengt Samuelsson, 48, a former student of Bergström's and his colleague at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, and British Pharmacologist John Vane, 55, of Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham, England. All three received the news in Boston, where they were helping to celebrate Harvard Medical School...
...Bergström's groundbreaking discovery was that PGs are manufactured in the body from polyunsaturated fatty acids, nutrients that are found in meat and vegetable oil. More than a dozen PGs have been isolated by the three Nobel winners as well as by other researchers. PGs often work in antagonistic pairs. One, for example, lowers blood pressure, while another raises it. One dilates bronchial tubes, a second constricts them. One promotes the inflammatory process, another inhibits it. A type called thromboxanes, discovered in platelets by Samuelsson in 1973, helps blood to clot; prostacyclin, a PG identified by Vane...
...award for basic medical research was shared by Drs. K. Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson, both of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, and Pharmacologist John R. Vane of Britain's Wellcome Research Laboratories. The three men were honored for their pioneering work in identifying and isolating prostaglandins. First thought to be produced only by the prostate gland-hence the name-prostaglandins are in fact manufactured and found everywhere in the body. They are like hormones and appear to regulate a wide variety of basic life functions, from controlling the clotting of blood and secretion of gastric acid...
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