Preventing heart disease
Some people are born with high levels of cholesterol, which clogs up the blood vessels and gives them a high risk of heart disease. In 1974 at Texas University, Nobel prizewinners Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein identified the proteins that control cholesterol levels in the blood. This helped chemists to develop new medicines that lower blood cholesterol and protect patients from heart attack. Modern genetics research aims to take a short-cut to identifying proteins via their gene instructions.
