Nobel Bioethics

October 7, 2009

Two of the Nobel Prize winners announced yesterday for Medicine or Physiology have something in common besides their groundbreaking work on how cells copy chromosomes. Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider both served on presidential bioethics commissions. Blackburn, of the University of California, San Francisco, was a member of the George W. Bush President’s Council on Bioethics. Greider, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, served on Bill Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission. They shared this year’s Nobel equally with Jack W. Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital for their discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.” (Science Progress)