The San Diego Union-Tribune

3 Americans share Nobel medicine prize






Their work, done in the 1970s and 1980s, showed how features at the tips of chromosomes – telomeres (TEE-loh-meers) – can keep them from getting progressively shorter as cells divide. It's been compared to the way plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces keep the laces from fraying.

Blackburn and Greider discovered an enzyme, telomerase (teh-LAH-meh-race), that maintains the lengths of the telomeres. Later research has shown that telomerase is switched on in almost all cancers.

Telomerase is active before birth, when cells are dividing rapidly. By age 4 or 5 it's basically shut off in almost all cells. That means the telomeres degrade over time, leading those cells to age and eventually stop dividing. But scientists have shown that adding telomerase to human cells can extend their lifespan indefinitely.





Monday's prize "is totally well-deserved," Shay said. "These people were clearly the forerunners of what is now becoming a much stronger field that has lots of interesting questions, (and that is) likely to have a major importance in medicine in the future."


Szostak, meeting with reporters, joked that he might use the money to send his two elementary school-age children to college. "They might like that," he quipped.

As for his work on telomeres, Szostak decided "it was time to move on" to another field. His current research is focused on the origins of life.

At a news conference in San Francisco, Blackburn joked that she had gone through the five stages of happiness after the phone rang in the middle of the night. "I went through, `Where's the phone?' to disbelief to dazed to, 'I think it's sinking in now," to, `I'm just so happy.'"


"It's really very thrilling, it's something you can't expect," she told The Associated Press by telephone.

Later, she said the award was "really a tribute to curiosity-driven basic science."

Nobel judges say women are underrepresented in Nobel statistics because the award-winning research often dates back several decades to a time when science was dominated by men. Still, critics say the judges aren't looking hard enough for deserving women candidates.

The Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced later this week, while the economics award will be presented on Oct. 12.


Associated Press Writers Rodrique Ngowi in Boston, Sarah Brumfield and Alex Dominguez in Baltimore, Mary Hudetz in Phoenix, and Malin Rising in Stockholm contributed to this report.


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