It’s that time of year again: leaves are falling, the days are getting shorter, and anxious researchers wait by their phones for the call of a lifetime. That’s right–it’s Nobel Prize season! This week, hypios takes a look at this year’s winners, who will be awarded their medals, diplomas, and grants in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10th. We’re sure they’re too busy fielding calls from reporters and working on their Nobel lectures to solve any of our problems–and besides, they’ve already made great contributions to science! But if you’re still waiting for your call, may we suggest that you spend the next year solving some problems on hypios.
We’re starting off with medicine, the first prize to be announced. ”Cervical cancer vaccines” like Gardasil and Cervarix have been on the market–and marketed–since 2006, with taglines like “One less!” or “We chose to protect ourselves!” Millions of women have been vaccinated, and researchers hope to dramatically reduce rates of cervical, vulvar, and anal cancer. These particular vaccines, however, work by creating immunity against the HPV virus, which can cause certain types of cancer, rather than attacking cancer itself.
Creating a cancer vaccine is an entirely different task–and one that might be possible, thanks to research by this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine recipients. Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak are sharing the prize for their work on telomeres and telomerase. Thanks to their discoveries, researchers have been able to develop and test new cancer treatments, including a cancer vaccine that targets telomerase. Even if these don’t work or produce unwanted side effects, the possibilities are exciting and “a continued flow of new data is expected,” as this article from the Nobel organization explains.
Chromosome replication is a long-standing problem in biology. If DNA doesn’t replicate itself exactly when a cell divides, the new cell lacks the necessary information to function, and may not be viable. In Szostak’s experiments with yeast, cells without telomeres divided poorly and eventually stopped functioning. Telomeres protect chromosomes from degradation during replication. They’re small segments of DNA that, positioned on the ends of chromosomes like tiny magnets, attract proteins to form protective caps. Blackburn, an Australian-born biologist, and Szostak, an American, discovered this after meeting at a conference in 1980 and collaborating on an experiment involving two different organisms. The fact that telomeres from one organism were effective in another, entirely different species hinted that there was a very basic biological mechanism at work.
In 1984, Blackburn and her Californian then-grad student, Greider, isolated telomerase. They discovered that this enzyme, which contains both proteins and RNA, actually extends the telomeres so the ends of chromosomes are not snipped off during replication. The RNA in telomerase serves as a template or platform for the DNA being built. The more telomerase activity a cell shows, the more genomic stability and viability it has.
Cancer cells have lots of telomerase activity, so their genomes remain intact through multiple divisions. This means they can divide over and over without degradation–they’ll function just as well after the fifteenth division as on the fifth or the first. If treatments could target telomerase activity, they could stop tumor growth and treat cancers. The research of Blackburn, Greider, and Szostak may also be used to develop treatments for inheritable diseases and to investigate stem cell behavior.
Blackburn in particular credits curiosity and an open mind for her success. As a child in Tasmania, she wallpapered her bedroom with drawings of amino acids, and as a teenager, once used her chemistry set to make explosives, according to a 2009 interview with Clinical Chemistry. As a doctoral student at Cambridge, she became interested in the molecular side of biology. There, she learned from biologists like Francis Crick and Max Delbruck, who were former physicists and worked by trying to ‘leap’ to ideas, placing “huge value on the elegant solution.” This approach inspired Blackburn to move away from the strictly ‘quantitative thinking’ traditionally used to solve problems in biochemistry. Later, she tried to give her students the same freedom to explore, allowing grad students and post-docs in her lab to work on their own projects rather than doing legwork for her own investigations. Asked to reflect on her success as a woman in science in the same interview, she said that perhaps men and women think about things differently, but “that’s great because [it's] how you solve problems–you have different minds, different ways of thinking about problems.”
Given our hope that Solvers will collaborate across fields and contribute solutions to problems beyond their specialties, we couldn’t agree more. Obviously, this attitude has paid off for Blackburn and her colleagues in their scientific investigations.
Illustration from Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis on flickr.
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