Elizabeth Blackburn Interview (page: 4 / 8) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

Dr. Blackburn, was there a teacher who was particularly influential as you were growing up?

Elizabeth Blackburn: I think that there were various teachers throughout.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had a good math teacher who -- just by getting me to do something in front of the class, show some problem solving in front of the class -- kind of let me see, "Oh yes, I can do that." Not that math was my greatest, strongest subject, but he let me see, "Yes, I've got this ability. I can do things that I hadn't really thought I could do." And especially, when I was doing high school, my sense is there was much less awareness, compared to the way there is now, about the way women relate to science and math, and how in a mixed group of girls and boys, the boys tended to be more outgoing and so forth. Now I look back at him, and I think he was an extraordinary teacher, because he drew me out, and he did this and made me realize in a way that perhaps most other teachers wouldn't have taken the time to.

What was his name and where was he?

Elizabeth Blackburn: This was at University High School in Melbourne, Australia. Mr. Stoddard was his name -- we always called our teachers "Mister" -- Len Stoddard. A good teacher. A good math teacher. My Ph.D. was done in Cambridge in England, and I had a couple of professors in Australia when I was an undergraduate, where I was doing some research, and they had been to two different places. One had been to Rockefeller University, one had been to Cambridge, England, and they both said, "You really should think of going and doing your further training at one of these places." And the Rockefeller one, he said, "Well, the books used to get so dirty with all the pollution." I thought, "Oh, well. I better not go to New York." So you know, I'm really shocked at the triviality of the things that make you make decisions. But they encouraged me.

Who were these teachers?

Elizabeth Blackburn: This was Barry Davidson and Theo Dopheide. They were two professors at the University of Melbourne where I was doing undergraduate research. This was right around the time of the moon shot.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We went across the street to the apartment of somebody who had a TV -- not everybody had a TV -- so we could watch this (the moon landing). We had this great -- we watched this, you know, amazing thing. We all came back, and then I was doing my little biochemical analyses and nothing had fallen into place, and I lost a whole lot of the sample, and I thought, "This is not a good day for my science." But then very soon after -- the same samples -- I had analyzed them, and I suddenly thought about them in a different way, and suddenly everything fell into place. And ah, yes! Now I understood what was going on. So I remember that very well, because there was a sort of juxtaposition of the moon's triumph, my technical failure, and then, very quickly after, somehow things just kind of fell into place. You know, it was a very trivial problem now, but at the time, that process of going through it was something that I suddenly realized, the addiction to science. That "Ah!" You've suddenly seen a way through. You've seen how something is. You've understood how something works.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

That was important, to have that opportunity to be doing research. Joe Gall is a professor at Yale University with whom I did my postdoctoral research. He was a very important mentor, because he gave people who came and worked with him a kind of self-respect, and made them feel very safe, such that they could blossom as scientists. Both men and women were, I think, very positively influenced, but for women it did particularly, I think, make a difference. The way a mentor can work in science is very important. I found it was very important in influencing how I felt about my going on to do science.

You mentioned the moon landing. Were there other events or experiences that had an impact on you growing up?

Elizabeth Blackburn: I haven't thought through this very much, but when I was an undergraduate, I remember there were certain kinds of science-related things that were important to me, because they would keep opening my eyes to certain things that I had never thought about before. I'll probably think of all the good stories when we leave the interview.

What about books? Was there any book you read when you were young that had a particular impact?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Books? Oh, great question. There was. There was one by a guy called (George) Gamow, and I got this book from the Melbourne Library. Melbourne has a very hot summer. This is a city built in the 19th Century, as though it was Britain. So there was this huge sort of classical arcade library. So in the summer -- no air conditioning -- so I would go into this library, partly because you could cool off a little. So I went into this library and there was this book by Gamow, and he was just writing this imaginative sort of interesting, provocative science. It was a popular book, and it was about, "What is life about?" and the codes and so forth. I was very intrigued and captured by that book. I can't remember the title. I racked my brains, because I remember the book and I remember the author, but I can't remember the title. I couldn't even tell you terribly much now about the detailed content, but I think there was something about the imaginative way he was approaching the science, and not this sort of very stolid, heavy-handed writing that a lot of scientific writing has.

You mentioned some teachers. Were there other people in your life growing up who inspired you or encouraged you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Elizabeth Blackburn: My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It's an interesting thing. I don't think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how -- individual patients weren't discussed -- but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren't even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them. I remember that was interesting. I could see what a broad sort of field medicine was, and I also kind of knew that it wasn't my field either, you know. I knew science was something that I would be much more interested in doing.

Did you think you'd prefer working in a laboratory to working with humans face-to-face?

Elizabeth Blackburn: I think there's a great irony in this, because in some ways, working in the laboratory, you really have to work with humans so much. Because who does the science? How do things advance, right? It's people. It's people thinking and being committed to doing work and so forth. Much more of science than anyone ever tells you, or that you suspect, is to do with people. In some ways the doctor-patient relationship is almost more remote. In science, you are very much dealing with people: your colleagues, your students. They are all very, very important to you, because their success and your success is all bound up together, because the science is difficult, so you have to work in a very integrated way.

Did you have siblings?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes. Lots of siblings. I have four sisters and two brothers. I'm the second of our family of seven. I read somewhere about the psychology of second siblings, and I hate to say, but all those things, it seemed like I could check them all off. It all sounded like me.

What, for example?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Oh, some of the things about needing to find your place and your independence and things like that. I'm very, very close to my older sister. Now she went into the medical side of things. She's a physician and a hematologist. We had a very close relationship and I greatly admired her, but that might have been partly related to the fact I didn't want to try and just emulate and do exactly the same thing as she did. Perhaps I wanted to find my own niche, and perhaps that's why I went into science. I don't know if that played into it, but I noticed that all seven of us, we each chose something as different as possible from the others.

We have the hematologist, me the scientist, my next sister is a kindergarten teacher and very talented at little kids. I never realized what a talent that takes until I had our own son and saw what insights she had. Then my brother who's a mining production engineer. My other brother who is a musician. And a sister who was a high school science teacher and still is. Then my youngest sister who went into pottery and now is running a computer graphics firm. It's like we all took everything as different as possible from the others, and kind of made our own little sort of niche, or our own little areas, even though nobody ever stated that explicitly in our family. Nobody ever specifically said, "I'm going to do something different from somebody else," but here we all did.

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