The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009

Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering how chromosomes are protected.

Blackburn, hailing from the University of California, San Francisco shares the spotlight with two other scientists. Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University and Jack Szostak of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.

The three scientists will each take home one-third of the $1.4 million prize.

The trio found that chromosome-capping telomeres — which Blackburn has compared to the plastic ends of shoe laces — and the enzyme telomerase protect chromosomes as cells divide.

Blackburn and Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation while Blackburn and Greider identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA.

The discovery will help boost the on-going cancer and aging research and may provide hope for chronically stressed out people.

According to the San Francisco Business Times, Blackburn, Greider and Szostak beat out other notable scientists, including Shinya Yamanaka of UCSF and the J. David Gladstone Institutes, whose work at Kyoto University in Japan produced an embryonic-like stem cell from adult stem cells.