ΦBK Members Awarded Nobel Prizes in Medicine & Chemistry
Phi Beta Kappa is pleased to recognize two of its members among the 2009 Nobel laureates — Carol Greider and Thomas Steitz.
CAROL W. GREIDER, with Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.
Carol W. Greider (ΦBK, University of California-Santa Barbara, 1983) received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1987, with Blackburn as her supervisor. After postdoctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Greider was appointed professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore in 1997.
Watch Video of Greider’s Nobel Lecture
Press Release for 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2009/press.html
THOMAS A. STEITZ, with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada E. Yonath, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
Thomas A. Steitz (ΦBK, Lawrence University, 1962) received his Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry in 1966 from Harvard University. He is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Yale University.
Watch Video of Steitz’s Nobel Lecture
Press Release for 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Who Belongs to Phi Beta Kappa?
Seventeen U.S. Presidents, 38 U.S. Supreme Court Justices and 136 Nobel laureates can be counted among the ranks of Phi Beta Kappa members. Learn about other prominent members here.