Jack Szostak

Jack Szostak shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work demonstrating that telomeres protect chromosomes from degradation and end-to-end fusion. His early yeast experiments were foundational to understanding telomere function and later informed cancer biology. He showed that telomere shortening triggers cellular senescence pathways relevant to tumor suppression. His broad contributions to molecular biology have impacted understanding of genome stability in cancer.