The FINANCIAL — Three Americans were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine on October 5 for identifying a key molecular switch in cellular ageing. It was the first time that two women have been among the winners of the medicine prize.
Australian-born Elizabeth Blackburn, British-born Jack Szostak and Carol Greider won the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.42 million), Sweden's Karolinska Institute said, according to Reuters. The institute said the three had "solved a major problem in biology". "The discoveries…have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies," it said.
The same source wrote that Blackburn is with the University of California, San Francisco, Greider is with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Szostak, at Harvard Medical School since 1979, is currently at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The trio, working in the late 1970s and 1980s solved the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide, AP reported. The Nobel citation said the laureates found the solution in the ends of the chromosomes — structures called telomeres that are often compared to the plastic tips at the end of shoe laces that keep those laces from unraveling.
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, according to the same source. The prize-winners' work 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. In addition, scientists believe that the DNA erosion the enzyme repairs might play a role in some illnesses.
“They made the initial important discoveries in the early days of telomerase research and this choice is quite justified,” Joachim Lingner, professor and head of the Lingner Lab at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, said in an interview, Bloomberg reported.
Last year’s prize in medicine went to France’s Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier and German virologist Harald zur Hausen for identifying viruses that cause AIDS and cervical cancer, the same source reported. informs. Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.
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