For 72 years, the prestigious Lasker Awards in biomedical research and public service have gone to top researchers and leaders “who have made major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of human disease.” The awards are seen as “America’s Nobels” by some and many winners also win Nobels—87 of them, to be exact.

This year’s winners are no different. But their awarding comes with a hint of a political message.

The winners are Douglas Lowy and John Schiller, National Cancer Institute researchers who worked to develop a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer and other tumors caused by caused by human papillomaviruses (HPV); Michael Hall, a molecular biologist who made advances in understanding fundamentals of cell growth controlled by nutrient-activated TOR proteins; and Planned Parenthood for “providing essential health services and reproductive care to millions of women for more than a century.”

In its award announcement Wednesday, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation heaped the usual praise onto each winner. But some of that praise seemed particularly well-crafted to contradict recent arguments and perspectives of top Republican leaders and President Trump, who have questioned vaccination programs , want to defund Planned Parenthood , and have proposed dramatic cuts to biomedical research funding

In a statement, Lasker Foundation president Claire Pomeroy, said:

“The decades-long work of this year’s Lasker Medical Research Awardees illustrates how critical it is to provide scientists with robust funding so they can pursue rigorous research. The sustained, century-long commitment of our Public Service winner to women’s health underscores how vital public and private support is to continuing Planned Parenthood’s mission.”

Winning work

The Foundation went on to describe how Lowy and Schiller provided seminal animal and clinical work to show that a vaccine could prevent against the high-risk HPV16 subtype, which accounts for a large chunk of HPV-related cancers. Merck & Co., Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) went on to develop vaccines using those findings. HPV is behind nearly every case of cervical cancer, which strikes more than 500,000 women each year and kills more than 250,000. By 2015, "By 2015, 59 million women worldwide and 20 million in North America had received an HPV vaccine," the foundation notes.

Hall was honored for his work in discovering how a large family of nutrient-dependent protein kinases, called the TOR proteins, play a central role in controlling the cell growth. TOR proteins are a now known to control the balance of protein synthesis and protein degradation based on the availability of nutrients. Hall showed that the TOR system could adjust a cell’s size based on nutrients. Thus, his work revealed the TOR system as “an unanticipated linchpin of normal cell physiology” and “broadened our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that underlie growth, development, and aging.”

For Planned Parenthood, the Foundation lauded its unwavering efforts and broad services for women and family planning, including providing STI testing and prevention programs, cancer screenings, sex education, and vaccinations, including HPV vaccinations. They note that one in five women in the US receive care from Planned Parenthood at some point in their lives. In 2015, the organization served 2.4 million people, including many who had no other options for healthcare. Of those, 72,000 patients had cancers or precancerous abnormalities detected using Planned Parenthood services. And the organization's sex education programs reach 1.5 million people each year. None of the organization's federal funds go to abortion services, in accordance with a 1976 federal law.