ACS congratulates member and journal author who is 2009 Nobel medicine winner

The American Chemical Society (ACS) today congratulated its long-standing member and journal author Jack W. Szostak, Ph.D., who was selected as a winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

"Dr. Szostak's selection is a wonderful illustration of chemistry's connections to other sciences, especially medicine," said Thomas H. Lane, Ph.D., president of ACS, which has more than 154,000 members and is the world's largest scientific organization. "The knowledge and creativity of ACS members like Dr. Szostak foster innumerable advances in medicine and other fields of science that range quite literally from astronomy to zoology."

Lane noted that Szostak has been an ACS member for almost 20 years, and has published extensively in ACS's suite of 34 peer-reviewed scientific journals. At least five of his research groups' 11 major publications so far in 2009 have been in ACS journals. They include the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

Szostak is with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard
University. Lane extended congratulations to the other distinguished
scientists who shared the prize. They are Elizabeth H. Blackburn,
University of California-San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider, of Johns
Hopkins University. The trio were honored for discovering how an enzyme
called telomerase helps to protect cells against the effects of aging.

Source: American Chemical Society