Nobel Winning Women

From Yahoo News:

Elizabeth Blackburn has become Australia's first female Nobel Laureate, after winning the Nobel Medicine Prize, along with Americans Carol Greider and Jack Szosta, for identifying a key molecular switch in cellular ageing.

The trio solved the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

The Nobel citation said the laureates found the solution in the ends of the chromosomes - structures called telomeres that are often compared to the plastic tips at the end of shoe laces that keep those laces from unravelling.

From About Women's History:

Herta Muller, a German-speaking Romanian novelist whose works are not well known outside Germany, was named the Nobel literature prize winner for 2009. Muller emigrated to West Germany in 1987 after being refused permission to leave in 1985. Her novels draw on her experience of the oppression and horrors of Ceausescu's Romania

From Xinhuanet:

Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath, the fourth woman who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, said on Wednesday that women can do as well as men in science.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science said in a statement on Wednesday that Yonath, together with Thomas A. Steitz from America's Yale University and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain's Cambridge, won the prize for their respective achievements on "the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life."

Yonath said after the announcement that she was very surprised about her winning the prize.