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.

Elizabeth (Liz) Helen Blackburn was born November 26, 1948 in Hobart Tasmania. She is biologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who studies the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes which protects the chromosome. She co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere.
Throughout her career, Blackburn has been honored by her peers as the recipient of many prestigious awards. She was elected President of the American Society for Cell Biology for the year 1998. Blackburn is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the Royal Society of London (1992), the American Academy of Microbiology (1993), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000).
Elizabeth Blackburn along with two other US scientists - Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their chromosome research.
The discovery determined how chromosomes can be "copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation," according to the citation.
The award includes a $1.5 million prize, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm on Dec. 10.