Nobel Prize : Medicine

Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak won the 2009 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for for their work on chromosomes.

Elizabeth Blackburn:

• U.S. and Australian citizenship, was born in Hobart, Australia in November 1948.
• A molecular biologist and biochemist , biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
• Conducted ground-breaking research on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and cell division that has provided a new line of inquiry into the chemical bases of life.
• Discovery of a key enzyme, telomerase, which is necessary for chromosomes to make copies of themselves before cell division, has been applied to the study of chromosome behaviour and of certain diseases, such as fungal infections and cancer gets her Nobel prize 2009.
• She was fired in 2004 from then-President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics for her criticism of his restrictive policy on embryonic stem cell research.

Carol W Greider:

• Born 1961 , US Citizen
• A molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins University.
• Investigated how a certain single-celled pond organism maintained the tens of thousands of caps on the ends of its mini-chromosomes – specialized structures known as telomeres that protect against DNA damage.
• Credited with helping co-discover telomerase, an enzyme that maintains the length and integrity of telomeres.
• She has continued her work on telomeres and documented a mouse model for dyskeratosis congenital, a rare, inherited disorder related to stem cell failure.
• She shared the 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Blackburn and Szostak.

Jack W. Szostak :

• Born in November 1952 in London and grew up in Canada.
• A biologist and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
• Made pioneering contributions to the field of genetics.
• He has studied the origin and early evolution of life through efforts to design and synthesize a self-replicating protocell capable of Darwinian evolution.
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