Congratulations to the winners of the 2009 Nobel prizes:

• Economics: Elinor Ostrom (governance of the commons) & Oliver Williamson (corporate governance)

• Peace: Barack Obama (for international diplomacy)

• Literature: Herta Muller (Poetry of the dispossessed)

• Chemistry: Ramakrishnan, Steitz, Yonath (Ribosomes)

• Physics: Charles Kao (Fiberoptic communication) & Willard Boyle and George Smith (the CCD imaging sensor)

• Medicine: Greider, Blackburn, Szostak (the discovery of telomerase)

I find it notable that from the six categories, an average person with a college degree would have some idea of what the first five prizes were awarded for.

But the prize in Medicine was for the discovery of something unknown to 99% of its own expert practitioners.

Why? Is telomerase biology an obscure backwater of the field? Hardly. A simple PubMed literature search brings up 16,385 citations for “telomere or telomerase”

A search of telomere + (other search words) yields these results:

• +Arthritis: 56
• +Atherosclerosis: 90
• +Neurological Disease: 644
• +Aging: 1,375
• +Cancer: 3,590

Someday, clinical physicians may have heard of a telomere, even though most all diseases they treat may be causally related to failures of protecting the tips of chromosomes.

With every day that passes, you will get older, but your doctor won’t get any wiser to telomere biology. Even a Nobel Prize in their chosen profession isn’t enough for 99% of them to “Wikipedia it” or take their eyes off of Health Care Reform or CNBC.

So maybe it’s time you did your own due diligence about what causes illness and aging? It is a lot simpler than exercise, diet, and anti-oxidants. It’s all about the telomeres.

To take the first step towards a longer and healthier life, go to www.rechargebiomedical.com/aging.html

Postscipt: Before you dismiss this newsletter, consider that telomerase is THE essential enzyme that protects the tips of DNA in all plants and animals. That’s EVERY SINGLE CHROMOSOME in every single plant and animal! That seems like a pretty significant discovery well worthy of a Nobel Prize. After all, Seven Billion other people were in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize just by virtue of not being George Bush 😉