American Jewish scientist Harvey J. Alter, along with fellow American Charles M. Rice and British scientist Michael Houghton, has won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The three were honored for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus, which affects millions worldwide.
The hepatitis C virus is the cause of hepatitis C, a very serious liver disease, as well as some cancers such as liver cancer and lymphomas.
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Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the Nobel Committee notes that the three's work "identified a major source of blood-borne hepatitis that couldn't be explained by the previously discovered hepatitis A and B viruses."
Their work, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, has helped saved millions of lives, the committees said.
Born in 1935 in New York, Alter performed his studies at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he remains active. Rice, born in 1952 in Sacramento, California, worked on hepatitis at Washington University in St. Louis and now works at Rockefeller University in New York. Houghton, born in Britain in 1950, studied at the Chiron Corporation in California before moving to the University of Alberta in Canada.
"Being the only son of Jewish parents in New York City, it was preordained that I would become a doctor," Alter wrote in 2013. "One of my friends, of similar background, chose not to be a doctor and has never been heard from again."
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