The Anitschkow Prize

Anitschkow Prize Winner 2012

The EAS is delighted to announce that the recipient of the Society's prestigious Anitschkow Prize 2012 is Professor Terje Rolf Pedersen Director of the Center of Preventive Medicine, Oslo University Hospital, Ullevål and University of Oslo, Norway.

Presentation of the Award and the Anitschkow Medal will take place at the Opening Ceremony of the 80th EAS Congress, Milan, Italy, May 25-28, 2012, where Professor Pedersen will present the Anitschkow Lecture.

To read more about Prof. Pedersen click HERE

Anitschkow Prize Winner 2010

The Anitschkow Prize lecture How does a cell regulate a lipid embedded entirely in its membrane? given by Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Michael Brown at the 2010 EAS Congress in Hamburg, Germany, is available to view online.
To see the full video,
Click HERE
We gratefully acknowledge Pfizer's support of this award.

Anitschkow Prize Winner 2011

The recipient of the Society's Anitschkow Prize 2011 was Professor Philip Barter, Director of The Heart Research Institute in Sydney, Australia.
Professor Barter presented the Anitschkow Lecture at the Opening Ceremony of the 79th EAS Congress, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 26-29, 2011. To see Anitschkow Lecture, please click HERE

The history of the Anitschkow Prize


The Society's most prestigious Prize is named after Nikolai N. Anitschkow, an experimental pathologist working at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg.
In 1913 he showed that simply feeding rabbits purified cholesterol dissolved in sunflower oil produced vascular lesions closely resembling those of human atherosclerosis, both grossly and microscopically. Controls fed only the sunflower oil showed no lesions. It is fair to say that this paper marked the beginning of the modern era of atherosclerosis research.
Anitschkow and his colleagues made numerous additional findings in the years that followed. However, his findings were largely rejected, or at least not followed up. If the full significance of his findings had been appreciated at the time, we might have saved more than 30 years in the long struggle to settle the cholesterol controversy and Anitschkow might have won a Nobel Prize. 

This excerpt is paraphrased from Daniel Steinberg´s excellent article “An interpretive history of the cholesterol controversy: Part 1” Lipid Res. 2004.45:1583-1593.