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Jack W. Szostak, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, was one of three Americans awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for medicine, for their discovery of the mechanism that helps protect the ends of chromosomes.
Szostak, along with Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, helped discover telomerase, an enzyme containing RNA that creates telomeres at the ends of chromosomes, which protect them and help maintain the integrity of the genome.
The trio’s research helped answer the question of how genetic material is not lost during cell division. It also answered questions about how cells have a specific lifespan. As long as the enzyme telomerase is active, the telomere keeps expanding with each cell division, making the cell immortal, as in embryonic stem cells or cancer cells. In human adults, telomerase is inactive and the cells in our bodies can only divide so many times, leading to cell aging and cell death.
In 2006, Szostak, Blackburn and Greider won the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award for the same research.
According to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s website, Szostak has since moved on to different research in his lab, studying the beginnings of life and whether RNA may have predated DNA and other proteins in the development of early life.
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