BEIJING, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- The winner of this year's Nobel Medicine Prize will be announced later Monday in Stockholm, Sweden, the first of the six award announcements to be made during the week.
Before the final announcement is made by the jury at Stockholm's Karolinska Institue at 0930 GMT, there has been a feverish guessing game about who will be the winner of the prestigious Noble Medicine Prize.
The following is a list of some top contenders for the prize, whose names have been circulated by international media in recent weeks:
-- British in vitro fertilization pioneer Robert Edwards.
-- Austrian-born American chemist Carl Djerassi, who was among the inventors of the female contraceptive pill.
-- Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese professor who discovered the secret of how to make stem cells from ordinary skin cells. Yamanaka could share the prize with Canadian scientists Ernest McCulloch and James Till, or with British cloning pioneer John Gurdon.
-- U.S. scientists Douglas Coleman and Jeffrey Friedman, who discovered a hormone regulating appetite, and were also tipped as Nobel Medicine Prize hopefuls.
-- Ralph Steinman, a U.S. scientist who discovered cells that regulate immune responses, is among the possible winners.
The contenders' list also includes American-French trio Ronald Evans, Elwood Jensen and Pierre Chambon who were involved in the research of nuclear hormone receptors.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (more commonly known as Nobel Medicine Prize), is awarded once a year for outstanding contributions in the medical field.
The Nobel Medicine Prize medal is presented to the recipient(s) by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on Dec. 10, along with a diploma and a certificate for the monetary award of 10 million Swedish kronor (1.49 million U.S. dollars).
As of last year, 100 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have been awarded to 195 individuals, 10 of them women.
The Nobel Prizes, established by Swedish industrialist and chemist Alfred Nobel, were first awarded in 1901, five years after his death.
