- Three Americans Share Nobel Prize for Medicine
- Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.
- The first time two women have been among the winners of the medicine prize
- The trio solved the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.
- Telomeres that are often compared to the plastic tips at the end of shoe laces that keep those laces from unraveling.(What a beautiful analogy!)
- Blackburn and Greider discovered the enzyme that builds telomeres -- telomerase -- and the mechanism by which it adds DNA to the tips of chromosomes to replace genetic material that has eroded away.
- Some inherited diseases are now known to be caused by telomerase defects, including certain forms of congenital aplastic anemia, in which insufficient cell divisions in the stem cells of the bone marrow lead to severe anemia. Certain inherited diseases of the skin and the lungs are also caused by telomerase defects.
Posted via web from Inquisitives' posterous
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