Nobel Prize for Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF
Nobel Prize for Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF
Elizabeth Blackburn from the University of California, San Francisco, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how chromosomes are protected. The award went also to Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University and Jack Szostak of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. The winners will share one-third of the $1.4 million prize.
The trio found that chromosomes- capping telomeres and the enzyme telomerase protect themselves from degrading when cells divide. Blackburn and Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation while Blackburn and Greider identified the enzyme that make telomere DNA. The discoveries have an impact on cancer research, aging and other diseases.
Blackburn is the fourth UCSF Nobel Prize winner, after Stanley Prusiner, Harold Varmus and former chancellor J. Michael Bishop.
SF Business Times-10/5/2009