Elizabeth Blackburn Interview (page: 3 / 8) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

How did this discovery of telomerase differ from science that had come before? What was new and significant about it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Greider: There was a lot of evidence that was already around that there was something going on at the ends of chromosomes, where DNA sequences could be added on to the ends, and that they were dynamic in some manner. There were some competing hypotheses as to how that DNA might be added on to the ends, and there was a very popular competing hypothesis, which was talked about a lot by some famous people who I respected a lot. And that particular thing was a recombination-based model for adding sequences on to the ends of chromosomes. So I do recall feeling a little bit intimidated by the fact that there were some really major groups out there who thought that this same process could be done by a different kind of mechanism. So who was I to think that I could grind up some cells and find some new enzyme that nobody had ever found before? Nevertheless, we thought maybe it's not done the way they think it's done. So you come in the lab every day, and do the next experiment, and just keep chugging away like one does a lot of things in life. You just take the next step, and then we found this evidence that the enzyme actually existed.

So after that initial discovery on Christmas Day, were there setbacks along the way that caused you to doubt yourself?

Carol Greider: I wouldn't call them setbacks. Like I said, we took about six months from the first hint that the enzyme existed before I was pretty much convinced that it really was what it was. So all along I kept trying to think of how could this data be fooling me. How could it be some other kind of activity that just looks like this, because I think I want it to look like this. How could I be fooling myself? And then thinking, "Well, maybe it's this other process," finding a way to test that. So there were points along the way when I thought, "Oh well, maybe it's not telomerase at all, but a DNA polymerase that's copying repetitive DNA." So there are little bits of doubt along the way, but that was part of the process of verifying. We ended up jumping through the hoops, and every hoop you always worry about what was going to be on the other side of the hoop, but by jumping through them all, at the end we were fairly convinced.

In university laboratories, it's often the professor who gets the credit for the discovery. It seems like Dr. Blackburn was very open to letting you do a lot of the good stuff.

Carol Greider: Yeah. That's the way it ended up working out. A lot of labs work this way. I'm also to the point now where I don't do a lot of experiments on my own in the lab, although that's what I like to do and that's why I got into science. You end up going into slightly different positions. So I'm more of a manager and a data analyst for the people that are working for me. At that point, Liz was probably working in the lab more than I am now. I was there, ready to do the experiment, so I was the one doing all of the actual hands-on experiments, and she and I would talk about them. As it evolved over the course of the four-and-a-half years that I was in her lab, I did all of the actual hands-on experiments, and she was very gracious in letting me continue to do that, even when it was clearly as exciting as it was. I started it and I got to finish it, and maybe it was slightly unusual.

Is it unusual, in this field, for two women working together to make this kind of discovery?

Carol Greider: It depends on what "this field" is. This field is telomeres.

Elizabeth Blackburn: And telomerase. It is relatively unusual. Women coming into degrees has become very usual. Women coming into assistant professorships was pretty unusual. I'm going to turn your question around a little bit. I think it did make a difference that there were two women in the field. A lot of people say, "Gosh, there's so many women in the field of telomeres and telomerase. My first thought is, "Of course there aren't so many. It's just a reasonable number of people." And then I realize, of course, compared with most other fields, it is a lot of women. So I think that that has made some difference, and I think it's terrific.

Carol Greider: In part, women feel more comfortable working in women's labs. I think that's some amount of it. And seeing the role models that are there. For a long time my lab at Cold Spring Harbor, when I was there, was filled entirely with women. There were eight people and they were all women. So I think that there's a certain amount of people seeking to work in the lab of role models. And then, of course, the people that then graduate from the lab go on and populate the field, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that a particular field might be founded by women. Actually, I think in this case it might be founded by Joe Gall, a man who was very supportive of women.

Elizabeth Blackburn: That's right, a good mentor of women.

Carol Greider: Because of that, there were a large number of women that came into the field, as I would say a jackpot event.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Not such a large number, but significant. The absolute numbers were not huge but...

Carol Greider: But relative to other fields.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes, that's right. Right.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. But it is great. You know, we co-organized a scientific conference last year, about 250 people came. Many of them happened to be women scientists and it is great. It's a real sort of terrific sense to see an area of research in which it's not the usual sort of demographics of relatively few women there, among the speakers, and among the invited participants and attendees and so forth. Because what happens is that even though women come into Ph.D.s at about equal numbers to men, more and more, as you look at what happens as careers progress -- and this is no surprise, accepting the numbers -- get much, much sparser as one advances in the career. And the old argument used to be it was the pipeline. We used to say, "Well, there were very few women in the pipeline." Can't hide behind that any more. It's not true. Lots of women are coming in, and have been coming in for a few decades in large numbers into these sorts of scientific fields.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Greider: I had the good fortune to be involved in writing the grant that we put together to fund this meeting that we did on telomeres two years ago. And typically, when one writes a grant for funds for a meeting there are certain boiler plate clauses that have to go in, and a lot of the funding agencies make sure that you want to invite women, minorities, and you have to state in there that you are going to go out of your way to invite these people. So I had a little fun, and I wrote the little boiler plate paragraph and changed it around to say, "Well, there are so many women in the telomere field that we will try to go out of our way and invite some men," and this got past the people at Cold Spring Harbor that had to vet the grant. So I was quite pleased that actually went to the funding agency.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes. I hope it is sort of a model, an encouragement. There can be fields where great science gets done. It doesn't have to be one group, one gender or another, who particularly dominate it. It wasn't like it was planned, but it has clearly evolved in that direction. So in answer to your question it is a little unusual and I hope it will be less unusual.

Dr. Blackburn, we'd like to hear about your childhood and how you first became interested in becoming a scientist.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Elizabeth Blackburn: I think I was very lucky, because I knew I was interested in living things from -- very, very young. I grew up in Australia and I would -- my mother tells me this, you know, I have no direct recollection -- but I remember I would pick up little poisonous ants and poisonous jellyfish. There are a lot of poisonous creatures in Australia, and I would pick them up and sort of pet them, and I'd really like them. I was interested in them, and of course this was horrifying for my mother, who was a physician who could see the stinging and the potential biting that would take place, but I seemed to have lucked out. I never got bit by any of these. And I think I have just known for a long time I was fascinated by living things, so I loved animals. And then in high school, as I started learning about what's in living things, I got very fascinated by what was then called biochemistry. Protein chemistry was something that was the field then, and I got fascinated by -- what are the building blocks of living things -- cells and molecules.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I feel very fortunate, because even in high school I kind of knew it was biology. I knew that was what fascinated me, and I pretty much knew that it was going to be something, as I saw it, looking deep into how these things really work -- which then was called biochemistry, and then became more molecular and more cell biology with the years. So I went through high school knowing fairly much that this would be where I would go, perhaps not even thinking about it all that much. I just kind of fortunately knew, but in Australia, socially, there was very much a strong sense that women didn't do certain kinds of careers. I was in high school once when somebody said -- this was an adult, not my teacher but some other teacher -- said, "What's a nice girl like you doing going into science?" I just remember that vividly. I didn't lash out at this person, because I kind of socially didn't know how to do that, but I just remember thinking, "That's interesting, and I'm not going to basically have any interaction with that person anymore." Because this person didn't seem to get that this was something that I cared about.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So then I moved on to a degree, and then the training. Again, as I say, I was so fortunate that I knew pretty much what kinds of things interested me, and I feel very lucky also, because I was in a system unlike the system in the U.S., where students have much more access to a broad undergraduate degree. We had to pretty much make our decision a lot earlier about the kind of degree we were going to take. At one point I had decided I wanted to look for a history and philosophy of science class. I thought I would love to take a class like that, and my schedule wouldn't allow it, but in going around to all the professors and trying to find out if I could make a schedule where I could take these classes, I was met with such surprise. Why would you want to do this? So for somebody who didn't know what they were interested in, this could have been a very bad situation, because you would get sucked into an undergraduate degree, and perhaps specialize much earlier. So I think the system in the U.S. that I see -- when I was teaching at Berkeley -- the undergraduates all take much, much more breadth of courses than we did. So I think that's a good system, because not everybody is going to have the good luck to know pretty early what kinds of things are interesting to them.

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