Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, a 1960 graduate of Walnut Hills High School, is now a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
Cincinnatians who know Dr. Prusiner were not surprised to learn of his high honor.
"I talked to a local neurologist 20 years ago, and he said, of all the people he knew, Stan was the likeliest to get a Nobel Prize," said Bill Strauss, president of the law firm Strauss & Troy and a former high school classmate and college roommate of Dr. Prusiner.
Mr. Strauss, who has kept in touch with Dr. Prusiner since their days as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, said Dr. Prusiner once lived on an island inhabited by cannibals to study brain diseases.
"Stan has been focused on this discovery for 30 years, and he put up with a lot of skepticism and disbelief from the scientific community because what he had discovered was so unusual many people didn't believe him," Mr. Strauss said.
Dr. Prusiner was rewarded for his 1982 discovery of "prions," proteins that cause brain diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow). Researchers think his work may someday be used to better understand diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Dr. Prusiner's findings have been controversial in the science community, because prions contain any genes or genetic material. The prize is $1 million.
Another high school classmate, Richard Lowenthal, now director of the California Neurological Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., said Dr. Prusiner's persistence was evident as a high school student.
"At Walnut Hills, we were members of a fraternity called the Round Towners," Dr. Lowenthal said. "He was the business manager and I was the treasurer, which basically meant I had to reign him in on various schemes he had. He had us selling candy bars during gym class to other people."
Dr. Lowenthal, who was a resident at UCSF along with Dr. Prusiner, said he was always impressed with his friend's determination.
Said Carol Watanabe Starrett - another of the 311 1960 graduates of Walnut Hills, who is now a guidance counselor at Turpin High School: "Gosh, to think I know a Nobel Prize winner. That's just fabulous. I remember him as brilliant, creative and articulate."
