2009 Nobel Prize Winners

This week the Nobel Prize was awarded to six innovative scientists for their groundbreaking work in medicine and chemistry. On the medicine front, Elizabeth H. Blackburn from University of California, San Francisco, Carol W. Greider from Johns Hopkins University and Jack W. Szostak from Harvard Medical School won for their work which uncovered how chromosomes can be copied completely during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Assembly has declared that this work is “an important piece in the puzzle [of] human ageing, cancer, and stem cells.”

In chemistry, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan from MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, Thomas A. Steitz from Yale University and Ada E. Yonath from Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, studied how ribosomes translate DNA information into life. Their studies, the first of which dates back to the 1980s, produced breakthrough information on antibiotics that will save lives, tackle drug-resistant bacteria and decrease suffering from stubborn infections.

While these scientists have very different backgrounds and specialties, they each prove that we have reached a unique moment of in the history of life science research. The work of these great minds has opened up our understanding of the complexities of life. Now, based on their research, some of which was conducted as far back as twenty years ago, groundbreaking, life-saving clinical developments are under examination and could reach patients in the years ahead.