September 22, 2006

Jack Szostak named recipient of Lasker Award

Jack W. Szostak, PhD, of the MGH Department of Molecular Biology, (left) has been named a co-recipient of the 2006 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. Presented by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, the Lasker Awards often are considered the American version of the Nobel Prize.

Szostak shares the award with Elizabeth H. Blackburn, PhD, of the University of California at San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. They are being honored for predicting the existence of and then discovering telomerase, an enzyme that builds and maintains the protective caps at the tips of chromosomes. These structures, called telomeres, are essential to maintaining proper chromosome structure and behavior.

"It's a great honor to receive an award like this and a great pleasure to be sharing it with Liz Blackburn and Carol Greider," Szostak says. "Even though my lab has since moved on to other areas, I've kept my eye on the telomere field. It's been wonderful to see how a few simple experiments driven by curiosity about the replication of chromosome ends have turned out to have such relevance to cancer and aging."

In the early 1980s, Szostak and Blackburn collaborated to find that the telomeres of a single-cell protozoan, Tetrahymena, also could protect chromosome ends in yeast. After showing that normal yeast telomeres had a related but distinct structure, they observed that, when Tetrahymena telomeres were placed into yeast and integrated into its chromosomes, new yeast-type telomeres also appeared, which led them to predict that a new enzyme was adding telomeres to chromosome tips. After Blackburn and Greider discovered this enzyme, now known as telomerase, Szostak and his team identified a protein required to maintain yeast telomeres, which turned out to be a key component of telomerase. That was the first work to show that the inability to add telomeres to chromosomes eventually led to cell death, an initial link between the molecular biology of telomeres and cellular aging and death. Today telomerase is intensely studied for its role in both aging and cancer.

In recent years Szostak's research group has been investigating the molecular origins of life, seeking to understand how complex chemicals are able to self-assemble and combine to form simple organisms that can reproduce and evolve. Currently, they are working to develop simple cell-like structures, along with investigating ways to use the cell's protein-making machinery to create new molecules and using the power of natural selection to create and study new RNA and protein sequences.