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MU Researcher R. Michael
Roberts and will share the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for
breakthrough research on understanding pregnancy. Photo
by MU Publications and Alumni Communications
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MU
Researcher Shares Top Science Award
Pregnancy — the act of one organism
coexisting, developing and thriving inside another — remains
one of the true mysteries of science.
Two U.S. researchers, one from the University
of Missouri-Columbia and one from Texas
A&M University, will receive one of science's premiere
awards for their work in unraveling the mystery of how a successful
pregnancy exists.
R. Michael Roberts, MU biochemist and animal
scientist, and Fuller W. Bazer, now at Texas A&M, will receive
the Wolf Prize in Agriculture
for their work on discovering Interferon-tau and other proteins
that enable an unborn embryo and the mother to chemically “communicate”
so that the pregnancy continues successfully. Their work pioneered
a greater understanding of the molecules responsible for maintaining
pregnancy and continues to help scientists learn why some pregnancies
are successful while others do not come to full term.
Roberts and Bazer were notified of their
award Jan. 7 by Yaron Gruder, director general of the Wolf Foundation.
The Israel-based foundation, established by inventor and diplomat
Dr. Ricardo Wolf in 1978, awards prizes in each of five scientific
areas: agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine and physics.
A sixth prize, for arts, rotates among the subjects of architecture,
music, painting and sculpture.
Roberts and Bazer will receive the award,
including a shared $100,000 cash prize, at a ceremony in the Israeli
Knessat in Jerusalem, May 11.
Roberts, 62, was born in the United Kingdom
and received his bachelor's degree in botany as well as his doctorate
of plant physiology and biochemistry from Oxford
University. He has been a professor of biochemistry and animal
sciences at MU since 1985. In 1996, he was elected to the National
Academy of Sciences, and has won numerous science and research
fellowship awards for his work in biochemistry.
The two scientists made a definitive identification
of Interferon-tau in late 1986. Roberts continues to work on the
biochemical mysteries of livestock pregnancies.
“The process a mother goes through,
changing from a cycling female to preparing the uterus to accept
an embryo and allow it to develop is just fascinating, really,”
he said. Finding the molecular differences between a successful
pregnancy, and one that is not successful, is basic to improving
animal reproduction efficiency.
“There are large differences in this process in ruminants
such as cattle versus in humans or other primates,” Roberts
said. “In cattle, the embryo does not attach itself to the
uterus until much later in the pregnancy. How the embryo signals
its presence, and how it survives during that time, is very complex.
There is still much to learn about process, and about how to detect
at an early stage whether an animal is pregnant.”
Since 1978, only 32 scientists have received the Wolf Prize for
Agriculture. Roberts is the second MU-based researcher to receive
the honor. Ernest Sears, a United States Department of Agriculture
wheat cytogeneticist based at MU, received the prize in 1986 for
his pioneering work in developing disease-resistant wheat and
other cereal grains.
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Last Update:
March 12, 2007
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