Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak Share 2009 Nobel Medicine Prize

Congratulations are in order for Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, which has spurred new lines of research into cancer. This is the first time two women have been winners of the prize for medicine at the same time. The trio solved the mystery of how chromosomes, which are the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading during cell division. 

The laureates, according to the Nobel citation, found the solution in the ends of the chromosomes, features called telomeres, that are comparable to the plastic tips at the ends of shoe laces that keep them from unraveling. Blackburn and Greider discovered that the enzymes that build telomeres and the mechanism by which it adds DNA to the tips of chromosomes to replace genetic material has eroded.

The trailblazing work of the prize-winners now set the stage for research suggesting that cancer cells use telomerase to sustain their uncontrolled growth. Scientists are studying whether drugs that block the enzyme can fight the disease. Additionally, scientists believe that the DNA erosion the enzyme repairs might play a role in some illnesses.

Blackburn, who holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Australian, is a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Greider is a professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Szostak, 56, who was born in London, has been at Harvard Medical School since 1979 and is currently professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is also affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Ten women have won the prestigious medicine award since the first Nobel Prizes were handed out in 1901. Prize founder Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, left instructions on how to select winners, but medicine winners are typically awarded for a specific breakthrough rather than a body of research. Nobel established the prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.