Nobel Prize winner was 1970 Jackson Laboratory Summer Student
| Date: October 5, 2009 |
An alumnus of The Jackson Laboratory’s historic Summer Student Program is a winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Jack W. Szostak, Ph.D., is the third Summer Student Program alumnus to win the Nobel Prize, after Laureates David Baltimore and Howard Temin, who were both at the Laboratory in 1955.
Today a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, Dr. Szostak spent the summer of 1970 at The Jackson Laboratory, while an undergraduate at McGill University, studying genes associated with thyroid function under the mentorship of Dr. Chen K. Chai.
At the end of the summer, Dr. Chai, now Professor Emeritus of The Jackson Laboratory, described young Jack in a memo to the director of the Summer Student Program: "I found him very sharp and sensitive in absorbing ideas and doing laboratory work carefully .... As a person, Jack is somewhat shy but he is very friendly. Perhaps, this is partly because he is about two years younger than his classmates. I certainly feel that Jack has a keen interest in science and has a good potential to be a scientist."
Dr. Szostak shares this year’s Nobel Prize with Drs. Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." Telomeres, structures on the ends of chromosomes, appear to have an important role in preventing damage to DNA during cell division. Their function, or failure to function, is implicated in aging, cancer and other diseases.
"This award really crystallizes the importance of chromosome and telomere maintenance to human health and disease," said Jackson Assistant Professor Rick Maser, a cancer researcher who investigates the genes involved in telomere erosion and its impact on cancer, degenerative disease, chronic inflammation and aging in humans. "The work of Dr. Szostak and his colleagues addressed a set of fundamental questions that had lingered in biology for 40 or 50 years: How are normal chromosome ends (telomeres) different from those on broken chromosomes? And how do normal telomeres stay intact? It also validates how studies using all manner of experimental organisms can be used to understand ourselves."
For more than 80 years, The Jackson Laboratory’s Summer Student Program has offered talented high school and college students the opportunity to conduct an independent biomedical research project under the guidance of a mentor. More than 2,000 students have completed the program and gone on to careers in science, medicine and other fields.
Jackson Laboratory scientist Dr. George Snell won the 1980 Nobel prize for his work in understanding the immune response. Twenty other Nobel prizes are associated with The Jackson Laboratory, through application of genetic principles first developed by Jackson founder Clarence Cook Little or through research using inbred mice developed at the Laboratory.
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community.
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