Research on cell ageing:

US trio share Nobel Prize for medicine

SWEDEN: Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak have not worked together in years, but their common research into cell ageing was celebrated on Monday as they shared the Nobel Medicine Prize.

Australian-American Elizabeth Blackburn, 60, left her native Australia to do her Ph.D. at Cambridge University in England and now teaches at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF).

Co-laureate Greider, born in 1961 in San Diego, was Blackburn’s student, and now teaches at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Jack Szostak was born in London on November 9, 1952, grew up in Canada, and is now part of the faculty at Harvard Medical School.

The trio worked together on research into DNA and chromosomes, and their later work on telomerase, the enzyme that makes the telomere DNA, earned them the Nobel Prize in Medicine Monday.

Blackburn, Greider and Szostak had also won the 2006 Lasker Prize, one of the most prestigious US science awards, for the same work.

UCSF’s Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann praised Blackburn’s “generous spirit, curiosity and highly collaborative nature” on the university’s website. Blackburn has been a professor of biology and physiology there since 1990.

“As a scientist, a colleague, a mentor and a woman in science, she is an inspiration to the nation and the world,” the chancellor added, saying her work had “revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the way in which cells function.”

Blackburn became an American citizen in 2003 but has kept her Australian citizenship and accent. Both of her parents were doctors, and she said it never occured to her that as a woman, she would not go into science.

Stockholm, Tuesday, AFP