Buchanan Medal
The Buchanan Medal is awarded by the Royal Society "in recognition of distinguished contribution to the medical sciences generally". The award was created in 1897 from a fund to the memory of London physician Sir George Buchanan. It was to be awarded once every five years, but since 1990 the medal has been awarded every two years.
Since its creation, it has been awarded 28 times, and unlike other Royal Society medals such as the Royal Medal, it has never been awarded to the same individual multiple times. As a result of the criteria for the medal, most of the winners have been doctors or other medical professionals; an exception was Frederick Warner, an engineer who won the medal in 1982 "for his important role in reducing pollution of the River Thames and of his significant contributions to risk assessment".
Two winners have also won a Nobel Prize. The first, Barry Marshall, who was awarded the Buchanan Medal in 1998 "in recognition of his work on discovering the role of Helicobacter pylori as a cause of diseases such as duodenal ulcer, gastric ulcer, gastric cancer and gastritis-associated dyspepsia" and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005. The second, Peter Ratcliffe, won the medal in 2017 "for his ground-breaking research on oxygen sensing and signalling pathways mediating cellular responses to hypoxia", and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019.
The first winner of the Buchanan Medal was John Simon, who won his medal in 1897 "for his distinguished services as an organizer of medical sanitary administration in this country, and as a promoter of scientific research relating to public health".
List of recipients
Source:| Year | Name | Rationale | Notes |
| 1897 | "for his distinguished services as an organizer of medical sanitary administration in this country, and as a promoter of scientific research relating to public health" | ||
| 1902 | "for his experimental investigations into the bacteriology and comparative pathology of vaccination" | ||
| 1907 | "for his services to sanitary science" | ||
| 1912 | "for his sanitary administration of the works of the Panama Canal" | — | |
| 1917 | "for his contributions to preventive medicine" | ||
| 1922 | "for his researches and discoveries in tropical medicine" | ||
| 1927 | "for his statistical researches and other work in relation to public health" | ||
| 1932 | "for his very important theoretical and practical work on immunity, especially in relation to diphtheria antitoxin" | — | |
| 1937 | "for his work in relation to public health problems in many parts of the world on behalf of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation" | — | |
| 1942 | "for his distinguished administrative service to hygienic science and practice" | ||
| 1947 | "for his distinguished researches on the physiology of nutrition, especially in relation to the causation of deficiency diseases" | ||
| 1952 | "for his outstanding research on malaria and on the Anopheles mosquitos which transmit that disease" | ||
| 1957 | "for his distinguished contributions to the control of malaria" | ||
| 1962 | "for his long and distinguished services to the support and administration of medical and biological research" | ||
| 1967 | "for his distinguished work on the medical aspects of bacteriology and immunity, and for the public health laboratory service of England and Wales" | ||
| 1972 | "for his outstanding studies on the aetiology, prevention and treatment of disease, especially cancer" | ||
| 1977 | "for his leading role in the standardization and safety control of vaccines" | ||
| 1982 | "for his important role in reducing pollution of the River Thames and of his significant contributions to risk assessment" | ||
| 1987 | "for his development of high resolution NMR spectroscopy for the study of cellular energetics and cellular enzymology, and for medical diagnosis, and of the insights and advances thereby gained" | — | |
| 1990 | "for his innovative studies on haemolytic disease of the newborn which culminated in new therapies leading to the elimination of this major fetal disease" | ||
| 1992 | "for his discovery of a lymphoma which bears his name" | ||
| 1994 | "in recognition of his notable contributions, over many years, to the application of molecular genetics to human medicine, in particular elucidating the many forms of molecular pathology that may underlie thalassaemias, and for his leadership in promoting the application of molecular genetics to medicine in the UK, not least as Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford." | ||
| 1996 | "for his contribution to vision research and his most important achievement in his discovery of the role of oxygen in the pathogenesis of retrolental fibroplasia now known as retinopathy of prematurity, together with his studies of the mechanism of hypertensive retinopathy, studies of the pathology of diabetic retinopathy and amoebic infection of the eye" | ||
| 1998 | "in recognition of his work on discovering the role of Helicobacter pylori as a cause of diseases such as duodenal ulcer, gastric ulcer, gastric cancer and gastritis-associated dyspepsia" | ||
| 2000 | "for his contribution to the foundations of understanding of the renin angiotensin system in particular through his seminal work on the isolation and determination of the structure of angiotensin, purification of renin, and subsequent studies on the control of renin release" | — | |
| 2002 | "Michael Waterfield for his exceptional skill in protein biochemistry which have transformed our understanding of signal transduction, and the subversion of cellular signalling pathways in cancer" | — | |
| 2004 | "in recognition of his discovery of the p53 protein and the subsequent research in which this basic discovery has been followed through to clinical application, exploiting the p53 pathway to find new treatments for cancer" | — | |
| 2006 | "for his many contributions to his field, ranging from the fundamental discoveries on the cellular origin and biochemical mode of the action of calcitonin to its application in clinical practice" | ||
| 2008 | "for his outstanding contribution to understanding the process whereby cancers develop and in the identification of major targets for their therapeutic treatment" | ||
| 2010 | "for his outstanding contributions to immunology, in particular to our understanding of the processing of foreign protein antigens within cells to stimulate T-cell immune responses". | ||
| 2011 | "for his outstanding contributions to understanding DNA repair and DNA-damage-response signalling pathways". | ||
| 2013 | "for his seminal work on the regulation of the human alpha-globin gene cluster and the role of the ATRX protein in genetic disease" | ||
| 2015 | "for his major contribution to our understanding of the genetic basis of heritable skin diseases" | ||
| 2017 | "for his ground-breaking research on oxygen sensing and signalling pathways mediating cellular responses to hypoxia". | — | |
| 2018 | "for his discovery that 5-methycytosine-binding MeCP2 protein silences transcription of methylated DNA and can reverse established Rett Syndrome in MeCP2 deficiency, the first demonstration that such neurodevelopmental diseases are curable." | — | |
| 2019 | "for establishing the fundamental cell biological mechanisms that drive cytotoxic T-cell killing, laying the foundations for informed application of cancer immunotherapy." | - |