James Rothman and Randy Schekman, of the US, and German-born researcher Thomas Suedhof.

“You have people that are moving from one place to the other to do whatever function they do. And then you move from one place to the other, in these carriers, the containers. That’s the bus, the motorcycle, the train.”

In his comparison, the people are the enzymes, hormones and other proteins and chemicals that do work and carry messages around our bodies.

If the transport system breaks down, they cannot get to where they need to go and cannot do what they need to do. The results are diseases -- from diabetes to disorders of the nervous system.

The Nobel Prize-winning researchers discovered how the cell’s buses, motorcycles and trains get to the right place at the right time. The process is so important that evolution -- development and change over time -- has not changed it much from the microorganism yeast to people.

University of Utah neuroscientist Erik Jorgensen praises the work of Randy Schekman at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Jorgensen says most neuroscientists would never imagine that the yeast cell would be a good model system for the brain. He says Randy Schekman discovered in yeast the genetic plan for the proteins that make up the delivery system of cells.

“We then subsequently found that the proteins involved in this process that allow us to think, that allow nerve cells to communicate with one another, are precisely the same ones that were found in yeast.”