The Asturias awards are given out annually in eight categories and are among the most esteemed accolades in the Spanish-speaking world.
The 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research has been given to Dr. Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The human microbiome is a vast collection of microbes that live in and on the body and play crucial roles in health. Gordon is being recognised for leading the discovery and understanding of this microbiome.
The 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research has been given to Washington University School of Medicine’s Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, a pioneer in the field of the microbiome.
The Asturias awards are given out annually in eight categories and are among the most esteemed accolades in the Spanish-speaking world. The prizes are intended to honour the “heritage of humanity” by honouring exceptional international scientific, technical, cultural, social, and humanitarian work.
Gordon is being recognised for leading the discovery and comprehension of the human microbiome, the enormous assemblage of microbes that reside in and on the body and are crucial to health. Meryl Streep, a winner of an Oscar, Haruki Murakami, a renowned author from Japan, and Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge from Kenya are among this year’s honorees in the other categories.
The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology director Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor Bonnie L. Bassler, PhD, of Princeton University, and Peter Greenberg, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle also share the research prize.
For their contributions to our understanding of the fundamental roles that communities of microbes play in supporting life on Earth, all three are being honoured.
A ceremony honouring the 2023 award winners will take place on October 20 in Oviedo, in northern Spain. Since their inception in 1980, the king of Spain has given these awards every year.
With Queen Letizia and their daughter Leonor, princess of Asturias and honorary president of The Princess of Asturias Foundation, King Felipe VI will once again preside over the ceremony this year.
Physicist Peter Higgs, primatologist Jane Goodall, and biochemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who are credited with discovering CRISPR gene editing, are just a few of the scientists who have previously received the honour.
Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, Annie Leibovitz, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Attenborough, and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) are some other past winners of Asturias awards in various categories.
The understanding of gut microbes has changed thanks to Gordon’s work from a narrow focus on specific disease-causing bacteria to a more comprehensive understanding of how entire communities of gut microbes play crucial roles in both health and disease.
For instance, Jeffrey Gordon and his colleagues have demonstrated how disruption of the gut microbial community development in infants and children can contribute to malnutrition and how particular therapeutic foods — created with knowledge of how they nurture beneficial gut microbes — can repair the microbiomes of children suffering from malnutrition and support their return to healthy growth.