The Amedeo Prize Winners 2008

July 2008

Text of the video Good afternoon, my name is Elise Prudhomme. We are here in Casteddu/Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. Casteddu/Cagliari is situated halfway between Africa and Europe. Here, in the 18th century University Library, Bernd Sebastian Kamps will shortly announce the winners of this year's Amedeo Prize. More than 1600 subscribers to the Amedeo Literature Service participated in the selection process. Patricia Bourcillier who co-sponsored the Amedeo Prize with 5,000 Euro. Ester Gessa, the director of the University Library. (...) Bernd Sebastian Kamps will be here within moments. For those of you who are not familiar with the Amedeo Prize, let me briefly explain the selection procedure. In December and January, 1453 articles were nominated for the Amedeo Prize. All articles published in 2007 and listed in PubMed were elegible for nomination. In February and March, during the first voting round, 156 articles were selected for the second voting round in April which in turn selected 21 articles for the final voting round in June. For each voting round, voters had three votes for three articles, worth four points, two points and one point. (...) I now present you Dr. Kamps, founder and president of Amedeo... (...) Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, I am pleased to share with you the results of the Amedeo Prize 2008. The Prize is for the first authors of the three most popular medical articles published in 2007. Awarding the Prize to first rather than last authors was a deliberate choice aimed at motivating young researchers and clinicians. The voters of the Amedeo Medical Literature Service have awarded the 2008 Amedeo Prize to the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, United Kingdom, for its article "Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls". The paper was published in Nature. The 2nd winner is Jennifer Baker from the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Center for Health and Society, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her article "Childhood body-mass index and the risk of coronary heart disease in adulthood" was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The 3rd winner is Kazutoshi Takahashi from the Department of Stem Cell Biology, Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences, Kyoto University, Japan. His article "Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors" was published in Cell. Let me express my gratitude to 1665 colleagues from all over the world who participated in the poll. Without their expertise the Prize could not have been awarded. They are the hidden stars of the Amedeo Prize. Thank you. (...) Habemus Papam. The medical article of the Year 2007 is the "Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls" by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. According to the Rules of the Amedeo Prize, the prize money will be divided among the three winners as follows: 12,000 Euro to the Consortium, 5,000 Euro to Dr. Baker and 5,000 Euro to Dr. Takahashi. With these last images from Casteddu I say goodbye to you. We will meet here again next year for the Amedeo Prize 2009. The nomination phase is scheduled to open in October. Elise Prudhomme, the Amedeo Medical Literature Service. Reporting live from Casteddu.