Elizabeth Blackburn Interview (page: 5 / 8) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

Dr. Blackburn, did your parents encourage your going into science?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yeah. Encouraging. Particularly my mother. I think she encouraged me in things that gave me a sense of self-worth, such that I knew what I chose would be respected. I used to play the piano a lot. There was some piano competition, some local thing, and she drove me, and not long ago I looked on the map and realized this distance she had driven me. Way across the state. It was the State of Tasmania, which is the smallest state in Australia, but still she had driven me this huge long way, just for me to play this piece of music and come back. So I remember just feeling that whatever I chose, I knew would feel relatively validated.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's interesting, my mother once -- I think she was trying to tell me, you know, there are certain -- you can do things in certain ways, it doesn't have to be all one way. I remember at one stage she said -- when I was a teenager -- she said, "You know, you don't have to go to university," meaning, you know, to college. And I think she was responding to the fact that I was putting myself under all this pressure, right. I remember feeling really mad at that. I didn't say to her, "What do you mean about this?" I just kind of listened to it. But I remember kind of a little resolve hardening in me. And then I look back at it, not so long after it had happened, and realized what the dynamic was. That she was saying, "Stop killing yourself here."

There are different ways to do different things, but at the time I had a typical teenager's response, which is to feel very rebellious at the suggestion. But I did feel kind of validated.

Your mother must have been quite an amazing person to have seven children and work as a physician as well.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes, she was. And it did take a toll.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I was in late teenagerhood she (my mother) started to have some signs of clinical depression, and for us, as the kids, we actually didn't really understand for a while what was going on. It was hard, because we didn't really have people to talk to about it. People didn't really talk about these things a whole lot. So I remember, we kind of each dealt with it in our own kind of individual way, but now I look back and I think it's interesting that perhaps society was in this way that even friends didn't sort of discuss it with us and say, "Well, you know, we see what's going on. We understand what's going on." So yeah, it was tough, and she suffered on and off all through her adult life. She has done basically fine, and I think in a way it sort of made our family -- especially us kids -- we are very supportive of each other and of her. My father is now deceased, but I think there has been a sort of -- it's been a very strengthening thing, but it was tough at the time. And especially, as I say, people didn't talk about it a whole lot. That just wasn't what people then felt they talked about, or didn't understand or something.

Was she ever hospitalized for depression?

Elizabeth Blackburn: At some stage she was, when I was in college. She was, a couple of times. It wasn't something that people comfortably talked about. We had some relatives in Melbourne, and people like that in the family, they talked with us about it, and were very supportive of us. But it wasn't something that you talked to your friends about. I think now it is better, because I think people do speak much more openly about it. When somebody is dealing with this they talk about it.

Did your father live to see your achievements as a scientist?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes. I think they were pleased.

Turning to you, Dr. Greider, Where were you born?

Carol Greider: Davis, California. Wait, wait, wait. I grew up in Davis, California. I was born in San Diego, California. I grew up in Davis, California.

How would you describe your family situation? Was it a big family?

Carol Greider: My brother and I.

What did your parents do?

Carol Greider: My father was a physicist at UC Davis, an academic physicist, and my mother was a biologist, although she died when I was six, so I didn't really know her. So my getting into biology, I think, is more of my own thing rather than necessarily following what she was doing. They were both Ph.D.s from UC Berkeley. So it's a family thing, since I also got my degree there.

You said you have a brother? Is he a scientist, too?

Carol Greider: He's not. He's a year-and-a-half older than me and he's in computer programming. He worked for a long time for Martin Marietta, a big defense firm, and then went off on his own. He's a freelance. He writes programs.

You're close in age. Are you close to each other?

Carol Greider: I think we've always been pretty close. We don't probably see each other as much as one would think, but I think of us as close, and we're always on the same wavelength. We probably see each other once a year, or once every two years or something like that, but I would consider it fairly close.

What happened to your mother?

Carol Greider: She died when I was six. She actually committed suicide.

Was there a history of depression?

Carol Greider: Yeah. I don't really know much from my own standpoint, although I've been told that there was. She had been in and out of the hospital when I was young.

That's a little too young to remember the trauma. Do you remember anything?

Carol Greider: I don't really remember much before I was six. Now that I have a three-and-a-half year old myself, it's amazing to me that one cannot remember anything before six. I remember a few things right around the time that she died, but I really don't have much detailed recollection before that.

Did your father raise the two of you alone, or did he remarry?

Carol Greider: Both. He raised the two of us for a while, and then remarried. I had a stepmother and a stepsister for a certain amount of time, and then that broke down and they got divorced. By that time I was off at college anyway, so I was sort of on my own.

Did your father encourage you to be a scientist?

Carol Greider: He didn't encourage me to be a scientist. One of the things I remember most from my father was that he was very clear that it didn't matter what we did, as long as we loved what we did. Just do whatever you want and make sure it's what you love doing. Retroactively, I look back on the conversations that we had with him, and realize that probably that's where my very strong ideal has come from. I think of it more in terms of academia. I have a strong penchant in that direction. Basically, to be able to have the freedom to do whatever you want is the most important thing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Greider: It's more important to do what you want than it is to make money. Making money was never an issue. Never valued in any way, aside that you could put food on the table. And all throughout high school, he would always tell us that the important thing is to do what you want for yourself. We would never get five dollars for getting an A or anything like that. We had other school friends that would get paid for getting good grades, and my father said, "You do it for yourself. And basically, you don't want to shut any doors. All the doors are open to you now. If you do well, they'll keep the doors open." And he convinced us somehow to go ahead that way.

Were you a good student when you were young?

Carol Greider: Yeah, I was. In high school I was pretty much up there. I wasn't a straight A student. I actually got a B in typing.

Did you always know you wanted to go into science?

Carol Greider: No, I didn't. I did well in science, and I enjoyed it in high school, and somewhere late in high school I got very interested in biology. So when I chose my major, which was to go to Santa Barbara as a biology major, I thought that I might be interested in ecology or something like that. It was sort of a vague idea when it started out. I grew up in a university town in Davis and everybody from my high school either went to UC Davis or UC Berkeley, and I wasn't going to do that. I was going to go somewhere else, but I still stayed within the UC system. I chose to go to UC Santa Barbara as an undergraduate.

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