AWARDS.

The article reports on the $1 million prize won by Alexander Varshavsky, a molecular biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for his new way of killing cancer cells. Since tumor cells often lose sections of DNA and pass the deletion to their daughter cells and while healthy tissues still have the DNA, Varshavsky introduced a vector throughout a patient's body. This small piece of engineered DNA would code for a toxin to kill cancer cells and for proteins that detect whether a cell contains the deletions and that the vector would self-destruct in healthy cells without the deletions. Varshavsky's idea was selected from more than 500 entries submitted.