Published 6 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4120
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4120

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Nobel medicine prize is won by scientists for work on chromosomal telomeres

Geoff Watts

1 London

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

As widely predicted, the 2009 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to one Australian and two US biologists for their work on the role of telomeres, the molecular caps that lie at the end of each of the chromosomes. Understanding the purpose and actions of telomeres has implications ranging from ageing to cancer.

The winners, who share a prize usually worth about 10 million Swedish kronor (£0.9m; {euro}1m; $1.4m), are Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Elizabeth Blackburn, an Australian who is now at the University of California at San Francisco.

The existence of a characteristic cap at the ends of chromosomes was first noted in the 1930s by the US biologist Hermann Muller. He coined the term telomere from the Greek words telos (end) and meros (part). Although he and others . . . [Full text of this article]


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