Harvard Medical School Professor To Receive Nobel

Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics Jack W. Szostak and colleagues Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider will be awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine in December for their research illuminating the cell’s solution to protect its DNA, the prize committee announced yesterday.

“The discoveries by Blackburn, Greider and Szostak have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies,” said the selection committee’s statement.

Telomeres, which Szostak first described with Blackburn in a 1982 paper, are regions of repeated DNA sequences at the ends of DNA strands that protect the overall structures from degrading during replication.

The importance of telomeres in aging, cell death, cancer, and stem cells has since been proven many times in subsequent research across the scientific community.

“If you look at telomere biology, there has been three major discoveries beyond the fact that chromosomes are linear. Szostak made the first one,” said Stephen J. Elledge, an HMS professor of genetics who has researched on the link between telomeres and cancer suppression. “This prize should have been received a long time ago. Szostak’s prize is very important, and I’m glad that [the committee] got it right.”

“When we started the work, of course, we were really just interested in the very basic question about DNA replication, how the ends of chromosomes are maintained,” Szostak told The New York Times yesterday. “At the time we had no idea there would be all these later implications.”

According to Alonso Ricardo, a postdoctoral student who has worked in Szostak’s lab, news of the award was great—but also expected.

“It’s been 20 years [since the discovery of telomeres], and all the applications that out of this research is very evident,” Ricardo said. “It was about time to get the prize.”

Szostak’s lab now focuses on synthetic biology, chemical systems, and the origins of life.

“The lab really has a sense of community, and even people who worked here ten years ago called and still had a sense of pride,” said Jason P. Schrum, a graduate student in Szostak’s laboratory. “He switches directions with the times.”

Schrum added that Szostak is “a great mentor...who is always pushing us to work deeper.”

This is the first year in which two female scientists will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Blackburn is currently a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Greider is a professor in the department of molecular and biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

—Staff writer Helen X. Yang can be reached at hxyang@fas.harvard.edu.