Jack Szostak, Ph.D. '77, has received the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for research that has implications for cancer and the biology of aging. A genetics and molecular biology professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Szostak received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell.

He shares the $1.4 million prize with two other Americans, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California-San Francisco, and Carol Greider, a molecular biologist and geneticist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Szostak graduated with a bachelor's degree in cell biology from McGill University in 1972 at the age of 19. After earning his doctorate, Szostak stayed at Cornell for two years as a research associate in the biochemistry department before Harvard hired him in 1979.

The Nobel citation states that the prize was awarded for prestigious work on telomeres -- caps on the ends of chromosomes that protect the chromosomes from degradation -- and on an enzyme that forms them, called telomerase.

The three scientists "have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation," the citation reads.

The discovery of this fundamental cellular mechanism revealed that cells age when telomeres are shortened. With cancer, telomere length is maintained and their activity remains high, which delays biological changes that lead to aging in cells and protects them from death. Some inherited diseases, including those of the heart, liver, kidney and immune system, are all related to defective telomeres.