Americans Share Medicine Nobel

Americans may have come home from Copenhagen empty-handed last week, but it appears we’ve had better luck in Stockholm: Americans Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak were named the winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their research chromosome replication, which has implications for cancer and aging research. According to the citation, they showed how chromosomes can be "copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation." The laureates discovered the solution in the ends of the chromosomes—the telomeres—and in an enzyme that forms them.