Carol Greider, Ph.D., one of the world’s pioneering researchers on the structure of chromosome ends known as telomeres, was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
October 5, 2009- Carol Greider, Ph.D., 48, one of the world’s pioneering researchers on the structure of chromosome ends known as telomeres, today was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Academy recognized her for her 1984 discovery of telomerase (ta-LAW-mer-ace), an enzyme that maintains the length and integrity of chromosome ends and is critical for the health and survival of all living cells and organisms.
Greider, the Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, shares this year’s prize with Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, and Jack Szostack, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, who discovered that telomeres are made up of simple, repeating blocks of DNA building blocks and that they are found in all organisms. Greider, Blackburn and Szostack shared the 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for this work.
