Jack Szostak

Jack William Szostak (London, November 9, 1952) is an Anglo-American biologist who was raised in Canada. Szostak is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres. His co-winners were Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider. Szostak is also credited with the construction of the world's first yeast artificial chromosome.
His lab has moved on to working on RNA. "By the year 2000, I started to pay more attention to fundamental questions related to the origin of life" (RNA world hypothesis). "Here the big question is whether RNA was in fact the first genetic polymer, or whether RNA was preceded by some simpler, easier to make or more robust genetic material". Recent work suggests that the RNA hypothessis is still alive.