image: Prof. Dr. Michael N. Hall.
Credit: University of Basel, Biozentrum, Matthew Lee
Michael N. Hall receives the Balzan Prize for his groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms that regulate cell growth and ageing. Michael Hall discovered two proteins, TOR1 and TOR2, which regulate cell growth and metabolism in response to nutrients. These play a central role in the ageing process and in the development of age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
The other winners of the 2024 Balzan Prize are the criminologist John Braithwaite from the Australian National University, the historian of science Lorraine Daston, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the American chemist Omar Yaghi from the University of California Berkeley.
The four prize winners were announced today by the International Balzan Foundation in Milan. This year's Balzan Prizes are awarded for research areas ranging from law to the history of science and from the biology of ageing to innovative materials. The prizes are endowed with 750,000 Swiss francs each, and it is expected that the prize winners will use half of the prize money to fund research projects involving a new generation of young researchers. The award ceremony will take place on November 21 in Rome in the presence of the President of the Italian Republic.
Multi-award winning researcher
For more than thirty years, Prof. Michael N. Hall has been working at the University of Basel’s Biozentrum. Here he discovered the protein kinase “Target of Rapamycin”, TOR for short, in the early 1990s. This protein controls cell growth and size by activation or inactivation of different signaling pathways. Dysregulation of the large TOR signaling network is involved in ageing processes and diseases such as cancer and diabetes.
Over the years, Hall has constantly added important pieces to the puzzle, unravelling our understanding of the enigmatic TOR. For instance, he demonstrated that TOR is found in two structurally and functionally distinct multiprotein complexes, which explained the different effects of TOR signaling in the cell. The work of Hall has led to a fundamental change in how one thinks of cell growth and ageing, and has provided important information for the development of anti-cancer drugs.
The 71-year-old Michael N. Hall was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Venezuela and Peru. He received his PhD from Harvard University and was postdoctoral fellow at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the University of California, San Francisco. In 1987, Hall joined the Biozentrum of the University of Basel as an assistant professor. Here, he has been working and teaching as a Professor of Biochemistry since 1992. He is also research group leader at the Institute of Human Biology in Basel, which was founded by Roche in 2023.
For his pioneering research Hall has received numerous prestigious prizes, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2009), the Marcel Benoist Prize for Sciences or Humanities (2012), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2014), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2015), the Lasker Award (2017) and the Sjöberg Prize (2020). In 2014, he was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Hall is the second researcher from the University of Basel to receive a Balzan Prize. The developmental biologist Prof. Walter Gehring, also from the Biozentrum, was awarded the prize in 2002.