For the first time in its eight-year history, the Albany Medical Center Prize went to two female researchers. They are Joan Steitz and Elizabeth Blackburn and will share the substantial $500,000 award, second only in the medical field to the Nobel Prize for medical sciences.

The prize was awarded today at the Hilton Garden Inn at Albany Medical Center in New York. Blackburn, 59, and Steitz, 67, are both molecular biologists. They both independently study proteins associated with RNA.

Elizabeth Blackburn, who is a research at the University of California, San Francisco, has made discoveries regarding structures on the tips of chromosomes, the telomeres. She uncovered the enzyme called telomerase, which plays a role in repairing the telomeres. Low telomerase levels eventually lead to damage of chromosomes. High telomerase levels can favor the growth of cancer cells.

Joan Steitz (see photo) is a professor at Yale and was the first woman to matriculate in Harvard's graduate program in biochemistry and molecular biology in 1967. She discovered small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs). They are particles which are essential in the removal of introns, the non-coding sections of precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA) or other RNAs, that are removed out of the RNA before the mature RNA is formed. They enable the body to ignore meaningless strands of information and replicate only useful DNA. Steitz' work enabled better testing for diagnosing lupus and other autoimmune diseases.