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Fred Knubel, Director of Public Information
FOR USE UPON RECEIPT: August 13, 1996

Societies Name Nakanishi Prize for Columbia Chemist

In an unusual international alliance, the American Chemical Society and the Chemical Society of Japan have created an annual scientific award together named for Koji Nakanishi, the renowned Columbia chemist who has transformed the field of natural products chemistry.

Though the societies will jointly award the Nakanishi Prize, they will take turns selecting the winners. The Japanese society, which has only once before named a prize for an individual, will announce the first recipient this month and will present the prize Dec. 7 in Tokyo and every other year thereafter, as part of a biannual Nakanishi Symposium it will organize. Administrative support is to be provided by the Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology, a nonprofit research foundation. The American society will announce the second recipient in its publication Chemical & Engineering News dated Aug. 26, 1996 and will present the prize at its annual spring meeting April 15, 1997 in San Francisco and every other year thereafter. Nationality is not a requirement for the award.

The award will consist of $3,000 and a bronze medal inscribed with the insignia of both organizations. It will recognize "significant work that extends chemical and spectroscopic methods to the study of important biological phenomena."

"The international component of the award is highly unusual and is the major reason for the American Chemical Society's enthusiastic support," said David Lynn, professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral student at Columbia in Professor Nakanishi's laboratory in 1977-79. "It's entirely appropriate that chemical societies in the two countries where Koji has conducted some of his best research honor those achievements."

The prize is the result of more than a year of consultations among the prize's organizers and chemical society officials in both countries, including the presidents of both societies, Ronald Breslow, University Professor at Columbia, and Hideki Sakurai, professor of chemistry at Tokyo Science University. Professor Nakanishi's colleagues in Columbia's Department of Chemistry, and former students in Japan and other countries, have conducted an extensive fundraising campaign to endow the award.

The idea first circulated at a 70th birthday symposium held to honor the Columbia chemist in May 1995. Organizers formed a Proposing Committee and many of the 230 former students who came to the weekend celebration contributed to the fund. Donations have also been received in the U.S. from Bristol-Meyers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute; Hoechst-Roussel Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Merck & Co., Inc.; Pfizer Inc. and Shaman Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

"Not one, two or even ten individuals get credit for this award," Professor Lynn said. "Koji has had a tremendous impact on the natural products field. That impact, and the many people who worked hard to bring this off, made the Nakanishi Prize possible."

In an extraordinarily productive career spanning 45 years, 27 of them at Columbia, Dr. Nakanishi, who is Centennial Professor of Chemistry, has investigated scores of natural products from plants and animals and has suggested commercial or therapeutic uses for them in more than 650 research papers. Though he has held professorial appointments at Columbia since 1969, he has also directed research at other institutions, including the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi from 1969 to 1977 and the Suntory Institute for Bioorganic Research in Osaka from 1979 to 1991.

He has determined the structure of more than 180 natural products that occur only in minute quantities: insect antifeedants, red tide toxins, insect and crab molting hormones. His work on wasps' paralyzing venom may provide insight into how human brain cells are damaged by oxygen deprivation. He demonstrated the mode of action of mitomycin, a widely used anticancer agent, and showed how polyaromatic hydrocarbons in cigarette smoke bind to DNA, causing cancer.

His research on retinal, a compound occurring in the human eye that is related to vitamin A, led to a widely accepted chemical explanation of color vision; more recently, he has determined the structure of a pigment in aged eyes involved in macular degeneration, an incurable eye disease. One of Professor Nakanishi's current research interests is molecular handedness and how biologically active compounds interact with receptors in the body.

His principal, and often neglected, contribution, say colleagues, has been to change how chemists analyze unknown substances. With only a microgram or less of material to analyze, natural products chemists can't attempt reactions with known reagents. Faced with this difficulty, Professor Nakanishi pioneered the extensive use of spectroscopy to determine the structure of unknown molecules, especially by using circular dichroic spectroscopy, which uniquely establishes molecular handedness in solution.

Professor Nakanishi earned bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Nagoya University in Japan, conducted postgraduate research at Harvard in 1950-52 and returned to Japan to teach at three prominent universities before joining the Columbia faculty in 1969. He was named Centennial Professor in 1980.

Members of the Proposing Committee were: Nina Berova, senior research scientist, Columbia University; Tim Blizzard, associate director of medical research, Merck & Co., Inc.; Raymond Cooper, director, discovery and spectroscopy, Shaman Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Rosalie Crouch, professor and dean of the College of Graduate Studies at the Medical University of South Carolina; Vincent Gullo, director of microbial products, Schering-Plough Corp.; Greg Verdine, professor of chemistry, Harvard University; Ted Widlanski, assistant professor of chemistry, Indiana University; Thomas Katz, professor of chemistry, Columbia University; Ben Liu, professor of chemistry, University of Minnesota; Professor Lynn; Roy Okuda, associate professor of chemistry, San Jose State University; David Schooley, professor of biochemistry, University of Nevada; Richard Stonard, senior vice president and chief technical officer, Calgene Inc.; Steven P. Tanis, associate director, discovery chemistry, Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc.; Michael S. Tempesta, chief scientific officer, Larex Inc.; and Diane Amy Trainor, senior section manager, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals division of Zeneca Inc.

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