A Medical School professor has won the Lasker Foundation's biennial Lasker-Koshland award for his lifetime achievement in medical science. Stanley Falkow, the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor in Cancer Research, was presented the prize at a ceremony in New York in late September. The Lasker awards are often called “America's Nobels”; the cash prize is $300,000.
Falkow is considered a doyen of bacterial pathogenesis, the study of how bacteria cause infection and disease. He is known especially for his work in discovering that bacteria can genetically transmit resistance to antibiotics, through extrachromosomal fragments called plasmids. Falkow became an outspoken critic of the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed, and he frequently points out the beneficial aspects of the complex interplay between humans and microbes.
Now 74, Falkow closed his lab last year but continues to teach. Prior to coming to Stanford's department of microbiology and immunology in 1981, he taught at the medical schools of Georgetown University and the University of Washington.
