Jack W. Szostak Quotes

Jack W. Szostak — Canadian Scientist born on November 09, 1952,

Jack William Szostak is a Canadian Americanbiologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres... (wikipedia)

What do cells do when they see a broken piece of DNA? Cells don't like such breaks. They'll do pretty much anything they can to fix things up. If a chromosome is broken, the cells will repair the break using an intact chromosome.

I have generally sought to work on questions that I thought were both interesting and approachable, yet not too widely appreciated. To struggle to make discoveries that would be made by others a short time later seems futile to me.

I do not know why I have always been fascinated by science or why I have been driven by the intense desire to make some original contribution. And although I have had some degree of success as a scientist, it is hard to say precisely why.

I was born in London, England during the great fog of 1952, but survived the coal-fueled air pollution with no ill effects and after less than a year in England was carried to Canada by my parents.

I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

Jack W. Szostak Quotes

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