Jack William Szostak shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for discovering how chromosomes are protected by telomeres. He is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA. His contributions to the field of genetics have helped map the location of genes in mammals and develop techniques for gene manipulation, which were instrumental to the Human Genome Project. His discoveries have also helped to clarify the events that lead to chromosomal recombination—the reshuffling of genes that occurs during meiosis and the function of telomeres, the specialized DNA sequences at the tips of chromosomes. The Szostak lab currently focuses on the challenges of understanding the origin of life on Earth, and the construction of artificial cellular life in the laboratory.
