More reason to be proud of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, as Dr. Jack W. Szostak, who is faculty shares the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2009 along with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco and Dr. Carol Greider of the Johns Hopkins University.
Their work mainly concerns the enzyme that build Telomeres- Telomerase. What are telomeres? Chromosomes are now an integral part of our vocabulary and their importance in genetics is the equivalent of the importance of alphabets in this sentence. Telomeres are essentially repetitive DNA strands which are formed on the edges of dividing chromosomes, preventing damage to the chromosome during duplication. Telomeres play a part in controlling cellular division. Their function and action is regulated by the enzyme Telomerase. The works of these scientists also show that the activity of the telomeres, which is controlled by telomerase, plays an important role in limiting the number of cell divisions to a fixed number, thereby effecting the aging process and limiting life span. Cancerous cells produce telomerase in abundance, which causes them to constantly replicate.
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