The winners of the 2010 Gairdner Awards : The Lancet

Medical researchers from the USA, Canada, UK, and France are recognised in this year's Gairdner Awards for their pioneering work in global health and biomedicine
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Canada's Gairdner Foundation honoured seven medical researchers on April 6 with some of the world's largest annual international research awards.

Gairdner International Awards valued at CAN$100 000 each went to William Catterall of the University of Washington, WA, USA; Pierre Chambon of the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire near Strasbourg, France; William Kaelin of the Harvard Cancer Center, MA, USA; Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford University, UK; and Gregg Semenza at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, MD, USA.

Also recognised were Nicholas White of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, who won the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, and Cal Stiller, chair of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, who won the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award for leadership in medicine in Canada.

Next to the Nobel Prize in Medicine, the Canada Gairdner Awards are the most prestigious global medical research awards, according to the Gairdner Foundation, which was established by Toronto stockbroker James Arthur Gairdner in 1957. The foundation began recognising pioneers in basic science in 1959. In 2008, the Government of Canada endowed CAN$20 million to support the awards.