Carol Greider Awarded 2007 Louisa Gross Horwitz
Prize
Carol Greider, the Daniel Nathans Professor and
director of Molecular
Biology and Genetics in
the Johns
Hopkins Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences, and one
of the world's pioneering
researchers on telomeres, will share the 2007 Louisa Gross
Horwitz Prize with colleagues Elizabeth H.
Blackburn, of the University of California, San Francisco,
and Joseph G. Gall, of the Carnegie
Institution. The awardees are honored, as they were by the
Lasker Foundation last year, for their
work contributing to the understanding of telomeres —
the structures capping the ends of
chromosomes — and their role in cancer and stem cell
failure.
Awarded annually since 1967, the prize was established
by Columbia University to recognize
outstanding contributions to basic research in biology and
biochemistry. Horwitz was the daughter of
Samuel David Gross, founder of the American Medical
Association.
"This is a well-deserved honor for three basic
researchers who pursued their work for the sake
of curiosity and knowledge — work that wasn't driven
by clinical goals but still led to better
understanding of human biology and disease," said Chi V.
Dang, vice dean for research at Johns
Hopkins. "We are thrilled that Columbia has chosen to
recognize Carol and her colleagues for their
accomplishments."
The groundbreaking work spans three generations of
teacher-student scientists. Greider, while
a graduate student in Blackburn's lab at the University of
California, Berkeley, discovered the enzyme
telomerase, which maintains the length and integrity of
telomeres, while trying to understand how
chromosomes maintain their length and integrity. Blackburn
previously had discovered a special DNA
pattern in telomeres while working in Gall's lab, then at
Yale. Their discoveries have drawn intense
interest from researchers studying the role of telomeres in
everything from aging to cancer.
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2007
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