2009 Nobel prizes recognize work with telomeres, ribosomes, light: CCDs, improved antibiotics among fruits of laureates' efforts.

News of this year's Nobel Prize winners spread quickly around the world via the Internet, thanks in part to one of the winners of this year's Nobel Prize in physics.

Half the physics prize goes to Charles Kao, retired director of engineering at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England, for research that enhanced fiber-optic cable for rapid telecommunications. The other half of the $1.4 million prize will be split by Willard Boyle and George Smith, both retired from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. They invented the CCD, a semiconductor device that captures images in digital cameras, telescopes and medical imaging devices.

In physiology or medicine, the 2009 Nobel recognizes the discovery of DNA caps on the ends of chromosomes and the enzyme that tacks on those caps. The chemistry prize celebrates research on ribosomes, the protein factories of cells.

In the late 1960s, about 99 percent of the light sent down a glass fiber disappeared after only 20 meters. Kao believed chemical impurities in the glass were to blame and calculated that light could zoom more than 100 kilometers through ultrapure glass. Researchers soon produced a kilometer-long optical fiber, and today more than 1 billion kilometers of fiber-optic cable carry phone calls and Internet traffic worldwide.

"When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe," says Fred Dylla, director of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Md.

At about the same time as Kao's work, Boyle and Smith were seeking a better form of electronic memory when they invented the CCD, or charge-coupled device. CCDs are silicon sensors that harness the photoelectric effect- which Albert Einstein explained in a 1905 paper that earned him the 1921 Nobel Prize to capture images electronically rather than chemically, as film does.

In the 1970s, the first commercial CCDs measured a mere 100 pixels by 100 pixels, far from the multimegapixel marvels in today's cameras and medical imaging equipment. CCDs have revolutionized photography, especially for astronomers (SN: 8/26/78. p. 146).

The medicine Nobel Prize recognizes Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco for identifying telomeres, repeated DNA sequences that cap the ends of chromosomes, in Tetrahymena, a single-celled freshwater organism (SN: 11/25/95, p. 362). She shares the prize with Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who teamed with Blackburn to find that telomeres from Tetrahymena prevented degradation of yeast chromosomes. Also sharing the prize is Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University who, with Blackburn, isolated the enzyme responsible for lengthening telomeres.

Telomeres prevent degradation of DNA during cell division and are important in human diseases of aging, some rare genetic diseases and in cancer.

In chemistry, three researchers will receive the prize for unmasking the structure of the ribosome, research that has led to the development of new antibiotics. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, shares the award with Thomas Steitz of Yale University and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

2009 NOBEL LAUREATES

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Elizabeth H. Blackburn

Physiology or Medicine

For discovering how telomeres protect chromosomes and for the enzyme telomerase

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Carol W. Greider

Physiology or Medicine

For discovering the enzyme telomerase

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Jack W, Szostak

Physiology or Medicine

For discovering how telomeres protect chromosomes

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Willard S. Boyle

Physics

For the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit--the CCD sensor

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Charles K. Kao

Physics

For achievements in transmission of light through fibers for optical communication

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George E. Smith

Physics

For the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit--the CCD sensor

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Chemistry

For studies of the structure and function of the ribosome

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Thomas A. Steitz

Chemistry

For studies of the structure and function of the ribosome

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Ada E. Yonath

Chemistry

For studies of the structure and function of the ribosome