Jack Szostak

University of Chicago

Jack Szostak is a British-American biologist and Nobel Laureate, currently at the University of Chicago. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Szostak's contribution to this work was foundational: his laboratory showed that specific DNA sequences at chromosome ends—telomeres—are essential for chromosomal stability and that yeast and human telomere sequences are interchangeable, establishing their universality. He also performed key recombination experiments demonstrating how telomere-deficient chromosomes become unstable. After the Nobel Prize, Szostak redirected his research entirely toward the origin of life, a question he has pursued with remarkable depth. His group has made major advances in understanding how the first self-replicating RNA molecules could have emerged from simple chemical precursors, how fatty acid vesicles could have served as protocells, and how chemical gradients could drive non-enzymatic RNA replication. This work aims to understand the transition from chemistry to biology on the early Earth. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the Genetics Society of America Medal, and election to multiple national academies worldwide. His career exemplifies the rare ability to make paradigm-shifting discoveries in more than one field.