Kai Simons, the man who launched the lipid raft on the cell membrane and who helped re-invigorate modern cell biology in Europe, has been awarded the 2016 Robert Koch Gold Medal for outstanding life work in biomedical research. The Koch medal comes with a €100,000 prize.
In Germany, Simons was a founding member in 1975 of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and a founding director in 2001 of the new Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden. Simons has been an ASCB member since 1986 and gave the Keith R. Porter Lecture at the 1990 ASCB Annual Meeting. In 2011, he made a three-part video about his cell membrane work for ASCB’s iBiology.
Born in Helsinki, Simons earned his MD from the University of Helsinki in 1964 and left immediately for a two-year postdoc under Arthur Bearn at the Rockefeller University, which was then a hotbed for the still emerging field of cell biology. He returned to Helsinki in 1967 to organize a research lab, using the newly discovered Semliki Forest Virus as a cellular probe. By the time Simons accepted a Group Leader appointment to the newly formed EMBL, his interests had turned to the cell membrane.
At the time, the cell membrane was thought to be a largely uniform, fluid mosaic. His work revealing a highly dynamic and locally organized membrane led to his description of distinct membrane microdomains of sphingolipids and cholesterol that he called “lipid rafts” because they reminded him of the great river rafts of logs constructed by lumberjacks in his native Finland. Lipid rafts were a highly controversial concept for years but the model has become widely accepted over time as Simons sharpened his descriptions to account for the rafts’ highly dynamic rise and fall. Lipid rafts are now seen as critical in cell signaling and membrane trafficking, as well as entry points and launch pads for a wide variety of viruses.
The Robert Koch Foundation can trace its foundation back to 1907 and Koch himself who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905 for his identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent of tuberculosis. Simons will receive the actual medal at a special ceremony in Berlin in November.
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
