Early this morning, Dr. Jack Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School learned that he and two colleagues had won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work with telomerase, an enzyme that prevents chromosomes from, um, "fraying." Yeah. We'll leave our explanation at that.

Szostak's two colleagues were Elizabeth Blackburn of UC San Francisco and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins. Apparently, the three had begun working together on the topic back in the 1980s, when none of us were even alive, much less pretentious enough to pretend that we actually know what telomerase is or what it does.

FlyBy is grateful that gifted minds such as Szostak's and his colleagues' still exist out there, although it would sure be nice if some of that brain power could diffuse (check out that science action!) for those of us who can't even finish our LifeSci 1a problem sets...

(Be sure to check out the longer article in tomorrow's Crimson!)