Elizabeth Blackburn

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Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Blackburn CHF Heritage Day 2012 Rush 001.JPG
With AIC Gold Medal, 2012
Born Elizabeth Helen Blackburn
(1948-11-26) 26 November 1948 (age 75)
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Residence US
Citizenship Australian and American
Fields Molecular biology
Institutions <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Alma mater <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Thesis Sequence studies on bacteriophage ØX174 DNA by transcription (1974)
Doctoral advisor Frederick Sanger[1]
Doctoral students include Carol W. Greider
Notable awards <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Website
biochemistry2.ucsf.edu/labs/blackburn

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS,[2] FAA, FRSN (born 26 November 1948) is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is currently the President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, becoming the only Tasmanian-born Nobel laureate. She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the Bush Administration's President's Council on Bioethics.[3]

Early life and education

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn was born in Hobart, Tasmania on 26 November 1948. Her family moved to the town when she was four, where she attended the Broadland House Church of England Girls' Grammar School (later amalgamated with Launceston Church Grammar School) until the age of sixteen. Upon her family's relocation to Melbourne, she then attended University High School, and ultimately gained very high marks in the end-of-year final statewide matriculation exams.[4] She went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in 1970 and Master of Science in 1972, both from the University of Melbourne and her PhD in 1974 from the University of Cambridge[5] on the bacteriophage Phi X 174 while a student of (Darwin College, Cambridge). She then carried out postdoctoral work in molecular and cellular biology between 1975 and 1977 at Yale University.[6]

Work in molecular biology

In 1981, Blackburn joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Molecular Biology. In 1990, she moved across the San Francisco Bay to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she served as the Department Chairwoman from 1993 to 1999. Blackburn is currently the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology at UCSF, and a non-resident fellow of the Salk Institute. She is the president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. Blackburn recalls:[7]

Carol had done this experiment, and we stood, just in the lab, and I remember sort of standing there, and she had this – we call it a gel. It's an autoradiogram, because there was trace amounts of radioactivity that were used to develop an image of the separated DNA products of what turned out to be the telomerase enzyme reaction. I don't remember any details in that area, 'Ah! This could be very big. This looks just right.' It had a pattern to it. There was a regularity to it. There was something that was not just sort of garbage there, and that was really kind of coming through, even though we look back at it now, we'd say, technically, there was this, that and the other, but it was a pattern shining through, and it just had this sort of sense, 'Ah! There's something real here.'

For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak.

In recent years Blackburn and her colleagues have been investigating the effect of stress on telomerase and telomeres[8] with particular emphasis on mindfulness meditation.[9][10] She is also one of several biologists (and one of two Nobel Prize laureates) in the 1995 science documentary Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times.

Studies suggest that chronic psychological stress may accelerate ageing at the cellular level. Intimate partner violence was found to shorten telomere length in formerly abused women versus never abused women, possibly causing poorer overall health and greater morbidity in abused women.[11]

Bioethics

Blackburn was appointed a member of the President's Council on Bioethics in 2002. She supported human embryonic cell research, in opposition to the Bush Administration. Her Council terms were terminated by White House directive on 27 February 2004.[12] This was followed by expressions of outrage over her removal by many scientists, who maintained that she was fired because of political opposition to her advice.[13]

"There is a growing sense that scientific research—which, after all, is defined by the quest for truth—is being manipulated for political ends," wrote Blackburn. "There is evidence that such manipulation is being achieved through the stacking of the membership of advisory bodies and through the delay and misrepresentation of their reports."[14][15]

Blackburn serves on the Science Advisory Board of the Genetics Policy Institute.

Awards and honors

In 2007, Blackburn was listed among Time Magazine's The TIME 100—The People Who Shape Our World.[25]

Personal life

Blackburn lives in San Francisco with her husband, John W. Sedat, and has a son, Benjamin.[26]

References

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  4. Brady 2007, pp. 1–13
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  14. Bioethics and the Political Distortion of Biomedical Science Elizabeth Blackburn, N Engl J Med 350:1379–1380 (1 April 2004)
  15. A Nobel prize for a Bush critic By Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, 5 October 2009 Free text. Extensive quotation from Blackburn's article.She is an important scientist throughout the world.
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  18. [1] Archived 12 October 2006 at the Wayback Machine
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  26. UCSF's Elizabeth Blackburn Receives Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, By Jennifer O'Brien. Press release.

External links