The Nobel in medicine is going to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, has decided to award the Nobel Prize in medicine for 2009 to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak 'for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase'.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn has US and Australian citizenship. She was born in 1948 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. After undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, she received her PhD in 1975 from the University of Cambridge, England, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, New Haven, USA. She was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and since 1990 has been professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Carol W. Greider is a US citizen and was born in 1961 in San Diego, California, USA. She studied at the University of California in Santa Barbara and in Berkeley, where she obtained her PhD in 1987 with Blackburn as her supervisor. After postdoctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she was appointed professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore in 1997.

Jack W. Szostak is a US citizen. He was born in 1952 in London, UK and grew up in Canada. He studied at McGill University in Montreal and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he received his PhD in 1977. He has been at Harvard Medical School since 1979 and is currently professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is also affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in medicine (shared) went to Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of 'human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer' and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of 'human immunodeficiency virus.'

The Nobel Prizes are awarded for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economics. The first five prizes were instituted by the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel through his will in 1895. With the exception of the peace prize, which is handed out in Oslo, they are all handed out in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December.