Among other accolades, she is a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, a member of the National Academies of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2006 recipient of the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement.

It has all come her way because of her imaginative research into how proteins function. Dr. Lindquist, the former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies how molecular proteins change shape in cell division. The process, called protein folding, can- when it goes wrong - lead to diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Last June, Dr. Lindquist and a group of colleagues published a paper in the journal Science reporting new clues about how Parkinson's develops and how it might be treated.

"Afterward, we received many calls here from people with Parkinson's," she recalled in her office at M.I.T.

"It was heartbreaking," said Dr. Lindquist, 57, who is a founder of FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, a startup biotechnology company seeking to develop drugs to fight Parkinson's. “We are still many, many years away from a drug. I hated telling people that."