Lisa Krieger of the San Jose Mercury News points out that all three of today's winners have Stanford connections: "Schekman earned his Ph.D. there, and Rothman's early research started on campus labs. Südhof is a current member of the faculty."

Both Südhof and Schekman are also investigators with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. UC Berkeley now boasts 23 Nobel laureates. Stanford is home to 20 Nobel winners.

Schekman said today that he had let his federal National Institutes of Health funding lapse since beginning work as a Hughes investigator. That means his research is not vulnerable to what he called "the assault on the federal government and in particular the drastic cutbacks in funding at the level of the NIH."

Schekman added that the United States is risking the loss of precious intellectual resources by pulling back on research funding.

"We have experience here at Berkeley, other institutions likewise, of foreign scholars who come here to set up shop, who are returning home as a result of what's going on in Washington," Schekman said. "We're losing a generation of young scholars who are unwilling to fight this battle."

Schekman, Südhof and Rothman will split a prize of about $1.2 million.

Joshua Johnson of KQED News contributed to this report.

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Berkeley, Stanford Scientists Share Nobel Prize for Medicine