When he started doing research in 1970, it became obvious to Lasker Laureate Leroy Hood that humans and their diseases were extremely complex. He set out to make technologies that would facilitate researching human disease.

The 2026 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award has been given to Kunihiro Hattori, Tomoyuki Igawa, and Takehisa Kitazawa for developing emicizumab.

Explore All 2021 Winners & Awards > Karl Deisseroth Stanford University Peter Hegemann Humboldt University of Berlin Dieter Oesterhelt Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry For the discovery…

In the early 1960s, cataract surgery was an ordeal that upended patients’ lives. During the operation, the surgeon made a cut that extended halfway around the eye’s front surface, reached in with forceps, and gently pulled out the cloudy lens. After the operation, patients spent up to 10 days in a hospital bed, sometimes with their

Lasker Laureate Karl Deisseroth shares the hurdles that had to be overcome to establish optogenetics, a revolutionary neuroscience technique.

Michael J. Fox says he is bringing everything he has to help cure Parkinson’s as the Lasker Foundation honors his advocacy and research work.

Read about the Lasker Laureates, including Mario Capecchi, whose work helped illuminate, treat, or...

One day in 1969, microbiologist Porter Anderson and pediatrician David Smith sat down in a lab at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston and rolled up their sleeves. After taking blood…

For their discovery of the two distinct classes of lymphocytes, B and T cells – a monumental achievement that provided the organizing principle of the adaptive immune system and launched the course of...

The 2021 Lasker Public Lecture, a collaboration with the Secret Science Cub, was given on October 20, 2021 by Karl Deisseroth, professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Deisseroth is a recipient of a 2021 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.

“Not a lot of people have an opportunity to make an unexpected discovery that leads to a dramatic program that really impacts the lives of millions and millions of people. But when you do, it is your responsibility to change clinical practice,” says Alfred Sommer, an ophthalmologist at John Hopkins University who lives by this

John Gurdon clearly didn’t have what it takes to become a scientist, according to his biology master at Eton, the famous public school in the United Kingdom. Of the 250 students who took biology in the same term in 1949, Gurdon had gotten the lowest score. Pursuing a scientific career “would be a sheer waste

The 2026 Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award honors Michael J. Fox for empowering patients’ voices and accelerating research to find improved therapies and a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

People thought that stress or alcohol led to ulcers, but Lasker Laureate Barry Marshall collected evidence to show the true cause.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly…

The patient who arrived at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, one day in 1968 was only seven, but she was already primed for a heart attack. Her cholesterol levels were more than seven times higher than normal. So much cholesterol was coursing through her blood that the fat-like substance was visible

The 2023 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award honors James G. Fujimoto, David Huang, and Eric A. Swanson for the invention of optical coherence tomography, a technology that revolutionized ophthalmology—allowing rapid detection of diseases of the retina that impair vision.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly…

What was life like for Lasker Laureates while they were doing their Award-winning work? Listen in as Award Winners share their personal stories. You will hear about starting off in research during a World War, learn how Laureates navigated family and career, and find out how

The 2026 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award honors Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa for identification of orexin, a brain peptide that maintains wakefulness, and the discovery that orexin deficiency causes uncontrolled sleep in narcolepsy—revealing a key insight into the nature of sleep.

In May of 1995, a man was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition and broke his neck, becoming paralyzed from the shoulders down. This would be a life-altering injury for anyone, but this man was Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman from 1978 to 1987. After his accident, Reeve became a forceful and eloquent advocate for federal funding of medical research. In 2003, he received the Public Service Lasker Award.