Telomeres, Telomerase and The Graduate Student

By Amy Price PhD
Carol Greider was still a graduate student when she started work on a project that along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak  won this year's Nobel prize for medicine. These US-based researchers  discovered how the body protects the chromosomes housing vital genetic code.

Genetics intrigue me because they are beautifully ordered and I have wondered and asked how the telomeres and telemorase are sequenced. When the telemeres are shortened life span is reduced whereas if there is uncontrolled growth cell corruption occurs. These scientists did more than ask they worked together to find answers.

Elizabeth Blackburn, of the University of California, San Francisco, and Jack Szostak, of Harvard Medical School, discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation.


Joined by Johns Hopkins University's Carol Greider, then a graduate student, Blackburn started to investigate how the teleomeres themselves were made and the pair went on to discover telomerase - the enzyme that enables DNA polymerases to copy the entire length of the chromosome without missing the very end portion.

Some inherited diseases are now known to be caused by telomerase defects, including certain forms of anaemia in which there is insufficient cell divisions in the stem cells of the bone marrow. Apparently elevated telomerase can be a biological marker for malignancy and there is research underway to see if vaccines can be developed to arrest the defects.

The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, which awarded the prize, said: "The discoveries... have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies."