X-Informatics

The 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry will be split among three researchers who, over the course of the past two decades, puzzled out—at the atomic level—the function of the ribosome in piecing together proteins.

The prize will be equally split between biophysicist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in the UK, biochemist Thomas Steitz of Yale University and molecular biologist Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, for their work in using X-ray crystallography to get a precise, atomic-scale map of the ribosome—the protein-making machine in all cells with nuclei that makes life possible.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics will be split among three researchers who laid the groundwork in the 1960s for today’s digital-media and telecommunications infrastructure. The Nobel Foundation announced the prizewinners in a news conference this morning from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Half the prize will be awarded to Charles Kao, formerly of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England (now Nortel), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kao was an early pioneer in the field of fiber optics, the transmission of information over flexible glass fibers.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded this morning in Stockholm to Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, Carol Greider, a professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and Jack Szostak, a professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase, the Prize committee announced in a press briefing.

Telomeres and the enzyme that creates them, telomerase, have had an important impact on the study of cancer, stem cells and aging.

A nature review published by the three Nobel laureates on telomeres and telomerase.

Telomeres, Telomerase and Cancer, an easier to understand article on Scientific American, by Greider and Blackburn, in 1996.