| 1987 | Donald Brown, MD | Carnegie Institution of Washington |
| 1988 | Walter J Gehring, PhD | Biozentrum University of Basel |
| 1989 | Raymond L White, PhD | University of Utah |
| 1991 | Steven L McKnight, PhD | Carnegie Institution of Washington |
| 1992 | Elizabeth H Blackburn, PhD | University of California, San Francisco |
| 1993 | Janet D Rowley, MD | University of Chicago |
| 1994 | Charles R Scriver, OC, MDCM, FRS | McGill University |
| 1995 | Peter N Goodfellow, DPhil, FRS | Cambridge University |
| 1996 | Stuart H Orkin, MD | Harvard Medical School |
| 1997 | Richard Axel, MD | Columbia University |
| 1998 | Bert Vogelstein, MD | Johns Hopkins University |
| 1999 | Philip Leder, MD | Harvard Medical School |
| 2000 | Joseph L Goldstein, MD | UT Southwestern Medical Center |
| 2001 | Joan A Steitz, PhD | Yale University |
| 2002 | Jeffrey M Friedman, PhD | The Rockefeller Institute |
| 2003 | Richard P Lifton, MD, PhD | Yale University |
| 2004 | Andrew Z Fire, PhD | Stanford University School of Medicine |
| 2005 | Sir Paul M Nurse | The Rockefeller University |
| 2006 | Huda Y Zoghbi, MD | Baylor College of Medicine |
| 2007 | Rudolf Jaenisch, MD | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| 2008 | Robert A Weinberg, PhD | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| 2009 | Michael Snyder, PhD | Yale University |
| 2010 | Sean B Carroll PhD | University of Wisconsin |
| 2012 | Carol W Greider, PhD | Johns Hopkins University |
| 2013 | Mary-Claire King, PhD | University of Washington |
| 2014 | Michael Levine, PhD | University of California, Berkeley |
| 2015 | Jeannie T Lee, MD, PhD | Harvard Medical School |
| 2016 | Tom Maniatis, PhD | Columbia University Medical Center |
| 2017 | Peter Donnelly, PhD | University of Oxford |
| 2018 | Hugo J Bellen, DVM, PhD | Baylor College of Medicine |
| 2019 | Jennifer Doudna, PhD | University of California Berkeley |
| 2020 | David Reich, PhD | Harvard Medical School |
| 2021 | David Kingsley, PhD | Stanford University School of Medicine |
