elizabeth blackburn

Posted: 05 Oct 2009 07:58 AM PDT

Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, was named the Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine for discovering how chromosomes are protected.

Blackburn will share one-third of the $1.4 million prize with Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University and Jack Szostak of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.

The trio found that chromosome-capping telomeres — which Blackburn has compared to the plastic ends of shoe laces — and the enzyme telomerase protect chromosomes as cells divide.

---