Loading ...
Somewhere in the hollowed underbelly of Stanley Hall, most likely in a smoke-billowing research dungeon where we humanities students have never, nor will ever venture in our Wordsworth-reading, co-ed-intramural-sports-playing undergraduate lifetimes, Professors Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider made a discovery that transformed our basic understanding of the cell as an underlying disease mechanism.
Blackburn and Greider, along with colleague John Szostak, won The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009 yesterday for the discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.”
So let’s break it down. Picture the spaghetti-like noodles of our DNA molecules stuffed into chromosome-shaped containers. Like four pasta-filled otter pops glued together. Got it? Now picture the plastic seals at the end of each of those otter pops. THOSE are telomeres. And the glue that makes the sealant? Telomerase. Aka the enzyme that Greider and Blackburn identified as the producer of telomere DNA.
In a nutshell, the telomerase DNA sequence prevents chromosomes from aging. And us from eating otter pops. Cancer cells have lots of telomeres, (making them pretty much immortal) which is one of the reasons it’s so hard to treat. Genetically-based diseases, on the other hand, show signs of malfunctioning telomerase. Also hard to treat.
Unsatisfied with our layman’s explanation? Watch Blackburn’s full lecture here.
Greider, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found a mentor in Blackburn as she worked towards her Ph.D at Berkeley in the ’80s. Once one of our own beloved professors of molecular and cell biology, Blackburn joined the UCSF faculty in 1990 to teach biology and physiology.
The Clog extends a warm congratulations to Professors Blackburn, Greider, and their colleagues for this extraordinary contribution to the scientific community.
(And for forcing us to now think about aging cells every time we break the seal of an otter pop.)
Image Source: the mad LOLscientist under Creative Commons
Berkeley News Center [site]
Nobel Prize Announcement [site]
Tags:Carol W. Greider, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, otter pops, Stanley Hall, The Nobel Prize
Comments (0)
Print This Post
Comments:
No comments yet.
