Waterston shares the $1 million award with Sydney Brenner, Ph.D., Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and John Sulston, Ph.D., former director of the Sanger Centre, Cambridgeshire, the genome sequencing center that led the British contribution to the international human genome project.

The three scientists were recognized for their ground-breaking work with Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1-millimeter-long roundworm. In the mid-1970s, Brenner introduced C. elegans as a model organism for studying cell biology and organ development.

Waterston, who joined Washington University in 1976, set up an independent laboratory to help establish C. elegans as a powerful experimental organism. Study of the tiny animal has led to a better understanding of such things as cancer, aging, and how the body eliminates unneeded and surplus cells.

Waterston and Sulston subsequently collaborated to successfully determine the order of the 97 million genetic letters in the worm's DNA. It marked the first time that all the genes of an organism of more than one cell had been sequenced and mapped, and it laid the groundwork for the international human genome project.

The project also marked the founding of Washington University's Genome Sequencing Center by Waterston. The center went on to play a leading role in the international human genome project.