Achievements of Nobel Prize winners for Medicine

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Now let's take a look at the achievements of the three winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The Australian-born Elizabeth Blackburn British-born Jack Szostak and Carol Greider have been honored for discovering and identifying "telomerase."

It's the enzyme that renews the little caps on the end of chromosomes. The Nobel jury says their work laid the foundation for studies that have linked telomerase and telomeres to human cancer and age-related conditions.

Their discovery has solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation.

The finding also helps us to understand the disease process, such as stem cell maintenance, and some inherited diseases.

Elizabeth Blackburn was born in 1948 in Tasmania. She's been a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco since 1990.

Jack Szostak was born in 1952, and is now a professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

The 48-year-old Carol Greider is the youngest woman to win the Nobel Prize. She's a biologist at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The annual Nobel Prizes are usually announced in October, and handed out on October 10th, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite.