STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- Two U.S. chemistry professors will share the Nobel prize for their work on channels in cell membranes, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.
Peter Agre of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., and Roderick MacKinnon of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of the Rockefeller University in New York will share the prize of $1.32 million, the BBC reported.
The academy described the pair's work as being of "great importance for our understanding of many diseases."
Discovering how substances pass into and out of cells is crucial to understanding very basic processes of life, and when scientists understand how cells relate to the world around them in a healthy body, they can begin to understand what goes wrong in diseases such as cancer.
"These are discoveries that are of fundamental importance for the understanding of life processes, not just among humans and higher organisms, but also for bacteria and plants," said Bengt Norden, chairman of the Nobel committee for chemistry.