Australian researcher Elizabeth Blackburn, whose co-discovery of telomeres has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Credit: Elizabeth Finkel/COSMOS
Elizabeth Blackburn is not a household name. But the string of illustrious science awards she holds already suggest she is a hot favourite for a Nobel Prize. And that's exactly what happened - finally in 2009, more than 27 years after her initial research.
My first impression of Blackburn is her naturalness. She's kindly-looking with soft, even features and unlined pink skin framed by a natural fall of shoulder-length greying hair. She speaks with a velvety English-accented voice, which readily breaks into a chuckle.
But for all the ready chuckles, Blackburn has a commanding presence. One imagines that Leon Kass, chair of former U.S. President George W. Bush's bioethics committee, got more than he bargained for after persuading her to join in 2001.
In 2004, when her concerns went unheeded, Blackburn publicly criticised two reports bearing her name as being scientifically misleading. She was promptly fired. Though relieved to be off the committee, she wondered at the wisdom of the Bush administration; her sacking served as a beacon of Bush's war on science. "The phone rang hot for weeks", she told me.
AS FAR AS FAMILY history, Blackburn was born in Tasmania into a family of physician parents and seven children. This makes her English accent somewhat of a mystery to her; perhaps it was imprinted during the year she spent in the U.K. when she was six, or later in her twenties, in the early 1970s, when she did her PhD at Cambridge in the laboratory of Fred Sanger.
Sanger was developing methods to read the sequence of letters that make up the DNA code, a feat for which he would eventually be acknowledged with a Nobel Prize. At the time Blackburn was just one of several students testing various approaches. Today a project like that would seem awfully boring. But not then. "You can't imagine; it was reading the code of life."
Though researchers had learnt to translate those parts of the DNA sequence which coded for proteins, the vast majority of DNA sequence remained indecipherable. Blackburn recalls her thrill at reading a sequence of DNA 48 letters long. Overall there was the reigning belief, that reading the sequence of the letters of DNA would reveal something - perhaps a clue to a new code or a three dimensional structure.
And if a structure could be inferred, then that might predict the function. That was what led to Watson and Crick's breakthrough two decades prior. Once they figured out the double helix structure of DNA, the mechanism by which life replicated itself became obvious: one strand of the helix provided the template to synthesise the matching strand.
marginatomy hypothesis
Sergey Chudov, Russia
It is a shame that the first author of the idea of shortening of chromosome ends, Alexej Olovnikov, was not awarded Nobel prize. He not only quite correctly proposed the cause of cell ageing, but also the reason why germ line cells do not subject to ageing, proposing existence of a specific enzime that rebild telomeres - and all this in 1971 publication!
Only one winner
Quite a bit goes into giving a Nobel Prize to someone. And for every person that gets it, thousands miss out. The work should be its own reward. Otherwise we're just chasing clouds or at worst, playing Lotto with our short years here on Earth. :)
> And for every person that
> And for every person that gets it, thousands miss out.
Actually, there are billions of people who don't get Nobel Prizes. But when a Nobel Prize is awarded for a particular scientific discovery, it should go to those, who made the greatest contribution. As this very article points out, the biggest contribution was made by Olovnikov.
However, as usual, politics dominate Nobel Committee's decisions.