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Lunch with a Laureate: Jack Szostak

Jack W. Szostak: April 28, 2010; Running Time: 1:00:06

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Jack Szostak started his first lab as a “freshly minted assistant professor” working in DNA recombination and repair reactions. While researchers had known for years that the broken ends of DNA strands behaved differently from broken DNA in the middle of the strand, they did not know the details. Because cells do not like broken ends, “they’ll do lots of things to repair that broken DNA.”

While attending a conference in New Hampshire in 1980, he met Elizabeth Blackburn who was working on an isolated piece of DNA that acted like a normal chromosomal end. They began collaborating on DNA that led to discovering the biochemistry of telomeres—those particular ends of DNA strands and predicting the existence of the enzyme, telomerase, which regulates them.

Through their work, medical applications have emerged with emphases in cancer and aging. Cancer cells are able to repair their broken DNA ends and can divide without limit; aging cells do not have enough of the enzyme telomerase to fix broken ends. They cannot replicate themselves, becoming shorter and shorter, then die.

Knowing that many other researchers would carry on his work in telomeres, Szostak shifted his lab’s work over to experiments on naturally occurring ribozymes. He had become interested in the work that Tom Cech was doing in catalyzed chemical reactions, particularly in how catalytic RNA works and its applications in terms of the origins of life.

When that work proved limited in scope, he “got interested in ribozymes that did things that we cared about.” His lab began creating RNAs that did new and different things. Work in the origins of life field, especially at the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, involves asking many broad questions about the processes of planet formation, early and atmospheric chemistry, and how Darwinian evolution gets going. “Once you’ve got all the molecules you need, how do they get together and starting acting like a cell? How does Darwinian evolution emerge spontaneously from simple chemistry?”

Lecture Details

Location: MIT Museum

“[The origins of life] is an unusual kind of science because we can’t go back and watch what happened. I don’t think we can ever be sure of exactly how life got started on our planet. What we can ask are simpler questions. What we’d like is just a plausible, reasonable pathway or maybe multiple pathways. Just a set of ideas of how you go step by step as the planet develops, as the chemistry changes, as it becomes more complicated. We’d like to have a path that looks reasonable all the way through. ”

Jack Szostak

About the Speaker

Jack W. Szostak

Professor, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Alex. A. Rich Distinguished Investigator, Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator
2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Jack W. Szostak studies the origin and early evolution of life through efforts to design and synthesize a self-replicating protocell capable of Darwinian evolution. He developed the Yeast Artificial Chromosome (YAC), in collaboration with Harvard biochemist Andrew Murray. The YAC, developed in 1980s, was the first artificial (synthetic) chromosome. YAC chromosomes are used by scientists to study and map chromosomes. In addition, YACs are now used as cloning vectors.

Szostak's work also sheds new light upon the biological processes responsible for the origin of life on Earth. In a continuation of the type of work started by American scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, who, in the 1950's, were able to form amino acids from inorganic materials present in Earth's early atmosphere. Szostak's work further advanced such studies by creating a synthetic entity capable of replication. More recent work by Szostak has focused upon the role of RNA as an enzyme in biochemical reactions. Such studies may shed light on the role primitive RNAs may have played in primitive cell organization and biochemistry.

He graduated with a B.Sc in cell biology from McGill University. He completed his PhD in biochemistry at Cornell University before moving to Harvard Medical School to start his own lab at the Sydney Farber Cancer Institute. In 1984, he began work at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Molecular Biology. He was granted tenure and a full professorship at Harvard Medical School in 1988. Szostak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider in 2009.

Jack W. Szostak

Szostak Lab

HHMI bio

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2009

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Museum

Cutting-edge technologies, amazing holograms, and the beauty of Harold Edgerton's strobe photography entertain, educate, and enlighten at the MIT Museum. Robotics, underwater exploration, kinetic sculptures, and the variety of interactive programs and historic collections attract visitors and researchers from around the world. This unique museum recently opened the Mark Epstein Innovation Gallery featuring some of the latest work of selected research groups at MIT.