Nobel Gestures

If it's October, it's Nobel Prize season, and this year's prize for Medicine went to three Americans for their work on telomeres, the "end caps" on chromosomes. Turns out the little end caps there play an important role in being able to make exact copies of chromosomes when cells divide.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak will share the $1.4 million prize for research on structures at the end of chromosomes called telomeres and on an enzyme that forms them, called telomerase.

It is the 100th year the prize will be awarded.

Szostak told CNN he got the news Monday in "that classic early morning phone call from Stockholm."

The Nobels keep their selection process top secret.

Szostak described it as "surprising and exciting" -- perhaps particularly for him, because he has not worked on the subject for the last 20 years. "I've been working on other things," he said. "It started off as a collaboration with me and Liz [Blackburn] -- Carol was a student of hers."

The work began as "a long-standing puzzle that we were interested in solving," he said. He added, "It was only over later years that it emerged, through the work of many people, that this was probably important for aging and cancer."

And hey, knowing is half the battle.

The long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry genes are packed into chromosomes. Telomeres are the caps on the ends of chromosomes. Blackburn and Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation, the Nobel announcement said. Greider and Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA. These discoveries explained how the ends of the chromosomes are protected by the telomeres and that they are built by telomerase.

If the telomeres are shortened, cells age. Conversely, high telomerase activity leads to telomere length being maintained and the delay of cellular degradation. That is the case with cancer cells, which do not degrade easily. Certain inherited diseases, in contrast, are characterized by a defective telomerase, which results in damaged cells.

So if telomeres get damaged, cells either break down and die (aging) or grow out of control (cancer). They may very well be the key to genetically beating a horde of diseases, and this research into telomeres could turn out to be absolutely vital.

Here's hoping the world can benefit from mastering telomeres soon.