NOBEL PRIZE: Two Americans, Swede Grab Medicine Award

      Two American neuroscientists and a Swedish researcher captured the Nobel Prize in Medicine yesterday for their discoveries in brain cell communication, the Washington Post reports. Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University, Eric Kandel of Columbia University and Arvid Carlsson of Sweden's University of Gothenburg will share the $915,000 prize, awarded annually by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute (Weiss, Washington Post, 10/10). While the scientists' efforts have led to treatments for Parkinson's disease, depression, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, ADHD and drug abuse, they won the award "not for sudden breakthroughs but for decades of separately conducted yet related basic research" (Gribbin, Washington Times, 10/10). "The payoffs [of their research] are potentially enormous," Dr. Stephen Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said. "We worked for many years on this without competition," Greengard said yesterday, joking, "because people thought we were insane" (Ritter, AP/Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/10).