Three scientists were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine to:

James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman 
and Thomas C. Südhof

for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, 
a major transport system in our cells

– from the press release from nobelprize.org

The full release can be found here. The  website  includes a link to a summary page illustrating the contributions of each scientist and how they come together to form a unified picture of vesicular traffic.

The New York Times article describing the award including an astute remark by NIH Director Francis Collins about the state of research in the United States. 

Dr. Francis Collins, the N.I.H. director, said in an interview on Monday. “Today we celebrate the three N.I.H.-supported Nobel Prize winners, but we’re being slammed by sequestration and a government shutdown.”

Even before the shutdown, scientists were facing severe budgetary difficulties that restrict the kind of research that led to this year’s Nobel Prize, Dr. Collins noted. “How many potential future Nobel Prize winners are struggling to find research support today, or have been sent home on furlough?” he said. “How many of them are wondering whether they should do something else — or move to another country? It is a bitter irony for the future of our nation’s health that N.I.H. is being hamstrung this way, just when the science is moving forward at an unprecedented pace.”