The Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine was awarded today to Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for their seminal work in the field of MRI or magnetic resonance imaging.
Also of note, I attended a lecture by Thomas Cech who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1989 for the discovery of catalytic properties of RNA. This, of course, brought about the revolutionary idea that earth may have begun as an RNA world with self-replicating RNA.
However, the seminar was of little relation to RNA. Cech's currently working on the problem of telomerase--the enzyme that is involved in elongating and capping the ends of chromosomes called telomeres. A common misconception in the public is the idea that if we are able to harness the mechanisms of telomerase, we may also be able to control our own mortality. This idea stems from data that shows a correlation between telomere length and lifetime. What it only indicates is that immortality is gained for the cell and not the organism as a whole. An example is cancer--cancer cells have defective telomerase and thus proliferate unchecked.
Most of the lecture dealt with the biochemical mechanisms in which the enzyme interacts with the ends of chromosomes. To make a long story short, Cech and his colleagues have discovered telomerase is especially picky and species specific. One base change at the chromosome ends can wreak the delicate balance of chemical bonds telomerase must make with the DNA. That's just the surface though. They have yet to figure out the myriad of other functions of the enzyme.
