Cancer team wins Nobel prize

Winners: Nurse (left) and Hunt celebrate in their lab

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- An American researcher and two British scientists have won the Nobel Prize for medicine.

U.S. researcher Leland H. Hartwell and British scientists R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M. Nurse have been awarded the prize for key discoveries in the nature of cancer cell development.

The 50 professors of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, which makes up the Nobel Assembly that votes for the winner of the physiology or medicine, announced the $1 million prize on Monday.

The assembly said the research "may in the long term...open new principles for cancer therapy," The Associated Press reported.

The human body is made up of billions of cells that divide as the body grows. Cancer develops when some cells start to divide in an abnormal way.

The award-winning team made crucial breakthroughs in understanding how cells control their division.

Hartwell, born in 1939, works at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, Washington.

Hunt and Nurse both work at the U.K.'s Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. Spokeswoman Dawn Boyall told AP that Hunt and Nurse were both "absolutely delighted."

The announcement of the prize for medicine begins a week of widely anticipated awards culminating with the Nobel Peace Prize -- the most prestigious award -- on Friday.

This year's awards mark the 100-year anniversary of the first ever Nobel Prizes awarded in 1901, funded by the late Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

According to his will, the medicine or physiology award was "to go to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine."

The first ever medicine prize was given to German scientist Emil Adolf von Behring for his discovery of a diphtheria vaccination.

Last year's winners were Arvid Carlsson of Sweden and Americans Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel for research on how brain cells transmit signals to each other.

Traditionally, the announcements are always kept closely guarded secrets. The winners are chosen from nominations received from professors, past laureates and other specialists from around the world.

The physics prize is to be announced on Tuesday, the prizes in chemistry and economics on Wednesday, and the peace prize on Friday.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was established separately in 1968 by the Swedish central bank but is grouped with the other awards.

This year, the prizes are each worth 10 million kronor or about $943,000.

To mark the centennial this year, all living laureates have been invited to the ceremonies and related seminars.

About 150 guests are expected in Stockholm and 30 in Oslo, including the former South African President Nelson Mandela and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The prizes are to be awarded on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896, where the winners will receive gold medals, diplomas and cheques.