Two Americans and one British scientist were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their work uncovering "how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability," the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announced. "Animals need oxygen for the conversion of food into useful energy," but until William Kaelin Jr., Peter Ratcliffe, and Gregg Semenza "identified molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen," the institute explained, nobody knew how cells adapted.
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