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October 5, 2009 - The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Greider and Szostak are members of the National Academy of Sciences; Blackburn is a member of the Institute of Medicine and a foreign associate of NAS.
DNA -- the long threadlike molecule that carries our genes -- is packed inside chromosomes, which are capped by telomeres that protect the chromosome from losing the DNA information they contain during cell division. Blackburn and Szostak discovered that there is a unique DNA sequence in telomeres that keeps cells from degrading when they replicate. Greider and Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that creates the unique DNA sequence that forms telomeres.