Four neuroscientists who discovered the genes involved in a host of serious brain disorders on Wednesday won this year’s $1 million Kavli Prize in neuroscience, honoring arduous work undertaken long before sequencing of the human genome accelerated investigations of what goes wrong in the brain.
Together, research by the four winners — Jean-Louis Mandel of France, Harry Orr of the U.S., Christopher Walsh of the U.S., and Huda Zoghbi of Lebanon and the U.S. — revealed the genetic underpinnings of Fragile X syndrome, spinocerebellar ataxia, Rett syndrome, and rare forms of epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder.