A trio of US-based scientists, were on Monday jointly awarded the 100th Nobel Prize for medicine for work on cell biology that has improved understanding of cancer and several inherited diseases.

Elizabeth Blackburn, a US and Australian citizen who is professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, shared science’s highest honour with Carol Greider, a US citizen who is professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and Jack Szostak, a US citizen born in the UK, raised in Canada and now professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.