all Jack Szostak stories

Jack Szostak 2009 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

404132862 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:01:59 -0400

Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for pioneering work in the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that protects chromosomes from degrading.

The work not only revealed a key cellular function, it also illuminated processes involved in disease and aging.

Nobel prize for chromosome find

404132862 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:13:09 -0400

3 Americans Share 2009 Nobel Medicine Prize

404132862 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:08:20 -0400

‘Immortality Enzyme’ Wins Three Americans Nobel Prize

404132862 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:28:12 -0400

Three Americans Win Nobel Prize for Medicine

404132862 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:24:13 -0400

Three Americans Win Nobel Prize for Medicine

404132862 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:22:03 -0400

Taking a stride toward synthetic life

50443248 — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:29:28 -0500

Harvard scientists have cleared a key hurdle in the creation of synthetic life, assembling a cell’s critical protein-making machinery in an advance with both practical, industrial applications and that advances the basic understanding of life’s workings.

Biologists on verge of creating new life form

404132862 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:47:33 -0400

J. Craig Venter named visiting scholar

404132862 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:22:11 -0500

J. Craig Venter, the visionary biologist and intellectual entrepreneur who was a leading figure in the decoding of the human genome, will join Harvard University as a visiting scholar at the University’s Origins of Life Initiative.

Venter, who left his last academic post in 1982, is founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute. He accepted the one-year appointment last week (Feb. 22). It starts March 1.

Did life originally spring from clay?

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:21:48 -0400

While the research is a far cry from proving that humans sprang from clay, as some creation myths assert, it does provide a possible mechanism for explaining how life initially arose from nonliving molecules. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital showed that the presence of clay aids naturally occurring reactions that result in the formation of fatty sacks called vesicles, similar to what scientists expect the first living cells to have looked like. Further, the clay helps RNA form. The RNA can stick to the clay and move with it into the vesicles. This provides a method for RNA's critical genetic information to move inside a primitive cell.