Nobel Prize for telomeres: focusing on the ends of DNA

It’s Nobel Prize season again, and the science behind this particular award for Medicine feels like a familiar friend. I got my crash course in telomeres and telomerase from a group meeting talk that one of my lab colleagues gave almost exactly a decade ago.

The science recognized was done a quarter century ago. DNA sequences have protective caps called telomeres that are maintained by a riboenzyme, telomerase, but the implications for the scientific understanding of aging, cancer and stem cells remain active research areas. Telomeres get shorter as we age, and maintenance of telomeres in cancer cells may help them continue to survive and divide. Part of the understanding of stem cells and their capacity for regeneration (or to cause cancer) will come from a better understanding of their telomeres.

This Nobel Prize story has many of the plot points associated with great discoveries, particularly the discovery of the telomerase enzyme, by Carol Greider in Elizabeth Blackburn’s laboratory on Christmas Day 1984. But notably, this award goes to two women: Blackburn of UCSF and Greider of Johns Hopkins University (They share the award with Jack Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School).

Though I wish that there were enough female Nobelists to make a double double-X chromosome Prize in Medicine less notable, it’s definitely a good day for women in science.