Biologists Peter Lawrence (Cambridge) and Gines Morata (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) have just been announced as the winners of this year’s Prince of Asturias award in the category of science and technology.

The news can be found in several Spanish (eg. El Pais ) and English (eg. LA Times). Their work is centred on developmental biology and according to the foundation that awards the prize: ””Their work is essential in understanding the formation of complete organisms and understanding the process of human aging and genetic diseases that cause illnesses like cancer”.

Of course developmental biology is something of interest to people that care about cancer: at the end of the day cancer is the developmental program going amok. One of the milestones of their research, according to the announcement, is that they found out that we share 60% of our genes with the drosophila. Given the importance of the non genetic part of the DNA (as discussed in my post yesterday) I wonder if we are not up to another revolution in developmental biology soon.