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US trio wins 2009 Nobel medicine prize

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-10-05 20:05

London-born Szostak 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, the citation said.

The award includes a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) purse divided among the winners, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

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The researchers have already won a series of medical honors for their enzyme research. In 2006, they shared the Lasker prize for basic medical research, often dubbed "America's Nobel."

Some inherited diseases are now known to be caused by telomerase defects, including certain forms of congenital aplastic anemia, in which insufficient cell divisions in the stem cells of the bone marrow lead to severe anemia. Certain inherited diseases of the skin and the lungs are also caused by telomerase defects.

The Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced later this week, while the economics award will be presented on Oct. 12.

Prize founder Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, left few instructions on how to select winners, but medicine winners are typically awarded for a specific breakthrough rather than a body of research.

Nobel established the prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.

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