Tiny pieces of the unborn baby's genetic material were found in the mother's bloodstream, not inside the mother's cells, as is usually the case.
The finding was greeted with a shrug when it was described in 1997. He said that after the team licensed the technology to a British company, they got the license back.
The significance of the technique is no longer debatable. Tens of millions of people have been tested for Down syndrome with the help of Dr. Lo's discovery, which has been used in more than 60 countries.
The Lasker Award is one of the most prestigious prizes in medicine and comes with $250,000 in winnings and a reputation for preceding a Nobel Prize. The clinical medical research category was won by Dr. lo.
Prizes were awarded in two other categories. The public service award was given to the creator of the Covid-19 Dashboard. A group of three researchers received the basic medical research award for their work relating to how cells interact with their surroundings.
His signature discovery was published in 1997 after he moved back to Hong Kong from Britain. It was several months before Hong Kong would return to China, and a resulting exodus of professionals created plum university openings for young scientists like him.
The doctor had been trying to find high concentrations of fetal DNA in the mother's bloodstream. He hoped that the discovery would help to eliminate the need for risky testing methods, which relied on sampling fetal tissue.
The mother's blood cells were being looked at for the unborn baby's genetics. He came across reports about the fact that a tumor's DNA was found in the blood of cancer patients. Fetal and tumor DNA could be found in the same part of the bloodstream.
He thought that the cancer in the patients was similar to the one that got into the uterus.
He was looking for Fetal DNA in the blood. He thought that was a good guess.
It was difficult to find fetal DNA in the mother's blood. There is an extra copy of chromosomes 21 that can cause Down syndrome. It wasn't enough to separate out the mother's and baby's genes. He looked at a large sample of randomly chosen DNA fragments from the mother's blood and found out if those from the 21st were elevated.
The task is similar to figuring out if someone has one or two coins in their wallet. He was unable to look inside the wallet, so he could study their overall weight using an extremely finely balanced balance.
He began to build that balance.
The other Lasker awardees were able to perform in different fields.
The public service award was given to Lauren Gardner, a civil and systems engineering professor at the University, for leading the creation of the Covid-19 dashboard.
She was approached by a PhD student about tracking cases of a novel pneumonia in China. He knew how to build online maps and mined Chinese websites for early case data. She wanted to make sure that the costs of not having access to timely data did not happen again.
She thought the research community would be interested in it.
The dashboard was receiving tens of millions of page views within a couple of months. The university dashboard became a go-to source for policymakers, scientists and ordinary citizens because of the lack of similarly fast or comprehensive case data from public health bodies.
She received calls from the U.S. State Department about the representation of certain countries on the map.
The dashboard was able to draw some of its power from being run out of a university. During the time when the Trump administration was downplaying case counts, that feature was in good shape. She said they were filling a void that should have been addressed by the government.
She said that they were doing what the C.D.C. should've been doing. They didn't have the resources to do it.
With governments reducing investments in detecting and reporting Covid cases, the future of the dashboard may be dictated more by the loss of high-quality data than by the direction of the epidemic, according to Dr.
She hoped that public demand for accessible health data would outlive the dashboard, even if there were still major challenges, such as a lack of national standards for reporting infectious disease cases.
There is an expectation for access to this type of data among the people that are affected. She said that similar maps and dashboards could be useful in the event of a flu outbreak.
The Lasker Award for basic medical research went to three scientists who described how cells bind to their surrounding networks of proteins and other molecule
Two of the winners, Richard O. Hynes, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti, of the Sanford Burham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, independently identified a molecule that helps to connect cells.
The third, Timothy A. Springer, is from Boston Children's Hospital. Some scientists were skeptical of that work in the 1980's. A professor once passed a napkin down the bar that said, "It doesn't work."
However, it did. The research led to the development of treatments for dry eye disease, multiplesclerosis, and inflammatory bowel disease.
The structure of the integrins that the three scientists were studying made it clear that they were all part of the same family. Dr. Springer said that Dr. Hynes invited him to his lab to look at the sequence of their respective genes. He met the doctor at the conference.
It was similar to a Gala apple to a Fuji apple.
The Lasker awardees are still working on their research. In Hong Kong, that has meant trying to use his insight from the 1990s, that tumors and unborn babies leave genetic signatures in the bloodstream, to develop tests that screen for cancer. Some early-stage cancers can be found with the tests.
It can save lives if your method is sensitive.
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