French and Japanese scientists win Lasker Prize for narcolepsy breakthrough

In the long human struggle to understand the architecture of sleep, two scientists working independently across different continents arrived at the same quiet revelation: that narcolepsy, a condition that collapses the boundary between waking and dreaming, traces to the absence of a single molecule in the brain. Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa have now received the Albert Lasker Prize for 1990s discoveries that transformed narcolepsy from a neurological enigma into a condition with a genetic foundation and, at last, a targeted treatment. Their work is a reminder that the most consequent