Nobel laureate honors deceased mother and other women achievers by awarding a "Nobel Prize for women"

Nicole Le Douarin, French embryologist, first recipient

Rockefeller University awarded the first Pearl Meister Greengard Prize to French embryologist Nicole Le Douarin on Wednesday, Oct. 27.

The prize was created by Rockefeller University scientist Paul Greengard to honor his mother, Pearl Meister Greengard, who died while giving birth to him. Greengard dedicated his share of the cash award from his Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in 2000 to establishing the prize.

The prize is intended as an American “Nobel Prize” for women scientists whose achievements in biomedical research merit international recognition. Le Douarin received a $50,000 honorarium as part of the prize.

The Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, presented this year’s prize, at the ceremony at Rockefeller University. Greengard specified that the Pearl Meister Greengard Award be presented each year by a woman who has distinguished herself in law, politics, the arts or the sciences. O’Connor became the first female member of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981.

“Women have made enormous strides in science, but they are not yet receiving awards and honors at a level commensurate with their achievements,” says Greengard. “It is my hope that by focusing attention on the accomplishments of women scientists, the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize will increase the likelihood that they will receive further recognition, including the Nobel Prize.”

Le Douarin, a pioneer in the field of developmental biology, has devised methods for following the fate of individual cells as they migrate to take their proper places in a non-human developing embryo. Her work has been especially important for understanding how the brain and nervous system are created, and also how the immune system develops. Her research has laid a foundation for understanding developmental disorders of the brain.

“We are honoring Dr. Le Douarin for her revolutionary discoveries, which are helping to solve one of life’s great mysteries—;how a single fertilized egg cell can give rise to a very complex living organism,” said Rockefeller University President Paul Nurse.

Early in her scientific career Le Douarin made the seminal discovery that a peculiarity of the cell nucleus in quail cells could become the basis of a marking technique for following the migration and fate of cells in a developing embryo that contains cells from both quail and chick. Using this technique, she demonstrated the importance of the neural crest—a ridge-shaped cluster of embryonic cells that give rise to most of the peripheral nervous system – and showed that precursor cells within the neural crest were multipotent, with the pathway of migration determining the type of cell into which the precursor cells developed. Le Douarin also made groundbreaking contributions using this technique to investigate the development of the blood and immune systems.

In addition, Le Douarin has provided a crucial link between classical embryology and molecular genetics, applying new genetic techniques to problems of cell differentiation and making fundamental contributions by identifying anatomical structures and functions related to specific genes, using deletions of candidate genes and following the developmental fate of embryonic cells.

Le Douarin’s leadership in the scientific community was also recognized at the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize ceremony. She has served since 1975 as director of the Institute of Embryology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Today Le Douarin is permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences and professor of the Collège de France. She has been elected to both the French and the U.S. national academies of sciences, as well as to the Royal Society in Britain. She is the recipient of many prestigious honors, including the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

Paul Greengard was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2000 for his discovery of how dopamine and several other transmitters in the brain exert their action in the nervous system. He shared the Nobel Prize with Arvid Carlsson and Eric R. Kandel. To create an endowment for the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, the cash award of Greengard’s Nobel Prize was supplemented by friends of the university and donations made to The Rockefeller University through its Women & Science Initiative, a program of support for women scientists at the university.