Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn is a Nobel prize-winning molecular biologist and biochemist. She is famous in her field for her work with the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome, and in 1984 she co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere.

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn was born in 1948 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia to parents who were physicians. She earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in biochemistry from the University of Melbourne in the early 1970s, and then went on to receive her doctorate from Darwin College at the University of Cambridge. While there she studied molecular biology, specifically the nucleic acid composition of bacteriophage Phi X 174, and became familiar with techniques of DNA and RNA sequencing. She worked in the laboratory of British biochemist Frederick Sanger, where she met her husband, John W. Sedat. Sedat later took a position at Yale, fortuitously bringing Dr. Blackburn to the lab of cell biologist and geneticist Joe Gall.

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Dr. Blackburn aligned her research with Gall’s, investigating the chromosomes of a protozoan called Tetrahymena. This is how she discovered that telomeres are composed of short repeating segments of DNA. By 1978, she was working as assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California and more thoroughly researching the function and maintenance of telomeres. She began working with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak and together they discovered telomerase.

Studying telomerase has led to hope for cancer treatment, clues to the mystery of aging, and biological links between life circumstances and lifespan. Doctors Blackburn, Szostak, and Greider were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research and contributions to the understanding of telomeres and telomerase.

Dr. Blackburn has published a number of scientific papers throughout her career, including her first book, “The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer.” She has accumulated numerous awards, including a United States National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and an American Cancer Society Medal of Honor. She continues to be at the cutting edge of telomere research, and her lab is now focused on telomere maintenance and how this has an impact on cellular aging.