Research on the enzyme telomerase, for which three American scientists won the Nobel this year, can help find treatments to several diseases,
including inherited forms of aplastic anaemia, when the bone marrow doesn’t produce enough blood cells, and genetic forms of skin and lung ailments.

The most intense research has been in cancer, where malignant cells have the ability to divide indefinitely, and in ageing, which occurs in the cells when telomeres are shortened.

Carol Greider, one of the winners, is a former triathlete who was preparing for a bicycling spin class when she got the call from the Nobel committee on Monday morning. She likened the group’s work to that of auto mechanics. It’s impossible to fix a broken carburettor if you don’t know how it normally works, she said.

“That’s what happens inside cells,” Greider said before taking her two children, aged 9 and 13, to school. “When you have that fundamental understanding of how it works, when disease comes along you can understand what went wrong. Now we know both cancer and degenerative disease have major implications with telomerase.”

Greider was a graduate student in Nobel co-winner Elizabeth Blackburn’s laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley. They join eight other female Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine, of the 192 individuals awarded the prize since 1901.