A Canadian researcher who helped discover a hormone that has a major impact on obesity is one of two scientists awarded the lucrative Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine.

Canadian Douglas Coleman, an emeritus scientist with Jackson Laboratories in Maine, and Jeffrey Friedman of Rockefeller University in New York, won the prize for their work on the hormone leptin, the organizers of the award said Tuesday.

The two researchers, who worked separately, will share a $1 million US payout that goes with the prize, said the Hong Kong-based Shaw Prize Foundation, which administers the award.

The Ontario-born Coleman identified a hormone that governs food intake and body weight while working on mice in the 1970s. From the 1990s and into this decade, Friedman, using gene mapping techniques, isolated that hormone — leptin, finding it was active only in body fat, a surprising and significant finding, given fat cells were not previously known to secrete major hormones.

The identification of the hormone led to research that showed some obese people have mutations to their leptin receptors.

"For those people who are beset with the problem of obesity, this is a most important discovery," Yang Chen-ning, the chairman of the Shaw Prize board, told reporters in Hong Kong.

"This discovery already shows that it is not a matter of willpower that is at the root of the problem of obesity, it is in fact a chemical process."

Coleman's work paved the way for Freidman to isolate the hormone, said the Shaw Prize Foundation.

"The Coleman/Friedman discoveries foster an explosion in our knowledge about how fat cells signal the brain to control energy intake," the foundation said in a release on its website. "Today we know that all normal humans depend on leptin to control their body weight."

Astronomy, mathematics work recognized

The Shaw Prize foundation awards three prizes in the fields of life science and medicine, mathematical sciences, and astronomy annually.

The awards, which were first given out since 2004, seek to recognize those who "have achieved significant breakthrough in academic and scientific research or application and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind," says the Shaw Prize Foundation.

The prize for astronomy was awarded to Chinese-born Frank Chu, a researcher at the University of California in San Diego. A specialist in star formation, he received the award in recognition of his life's work on the subject.

Two researchers, Simon Donaldson, a British professor at Imperial College, London, and Clifford Taubes, a U.S. professor at Harvard University, shared the mathematics prize for their work on three and four-dimensional geometry.

The awards will be presented to the winners at a ceremony in Hong Kong in October.