The Protein Society is pleased to announce that the winner of the 1997 Amgen Award will be Dr. Stanley Prusiner of The University of California, San Francisco. This award, which includes a prize of $5,000, and is given for an outstanding recent accomplishment in protein science, is made possible thanks to the generosity of the Amgen Corporation.
Stanley Prusiner is responsible for the unprecedented discoveries concerning the infectious pathogen causing Scrapie and other transmissible neurodegenerative diseases. He isolated the major, and possibly only, component of the infectious prion, demonstrated that prion diseases are uniquely both genetic and infectious, and accumulated substantive evidence that prions are an entirely new class of pathogens. Dr. Prusiner's award lecture will be part of the opening plenary session at the 1997 Protein Society Symposium in Boston.