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

Dr. Blackburn, you're not only a research scientist, but a teacher as well. Is teaching helpful to you as a scientist?

Elizabeth Blackburn: It's a terrific help.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One thing teaching makes you very, very clearly aware of is, if you don't really understand something, and think about it, you will never be able to teach it. So particularly starting at Berkeley, where I really had to learn how to teach undergraduates pretty early on, and that took a lot of work. That was a fairly daunting thing to have to teach undergraduates at Berkeley, without any kind of real training for it, and I remember feeling pretty under pressure while I was doing that. But it was worth going through that kind of crucible, because it was something that taught me a whole lot, and I learned the hard way. I have to say, I made a lot of mistakes in how I went about it. The poor students had to put up with a lot, but I realize that it is so important that if you teach, then it means that you've understood it, and then you've cleared your brain, and you've forced your brain to think about it, and that's really good.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

I think the two just go so much hand in hand, the science and the teaching. And then the students come back with wonderful ideas. There's always this back and forth between you, the teacher, and the people who you're supposedly teaching. Very much a two-way street.

Not many young people are as attracted to science as you were. What makes it so exciting for you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Greider: The ability to ask a question, to be curious about something, and get in and get the tools to answer it, and that nobody else knows that. It's something completely unknown. It's not like going to the library and looking something up. It's more probably the equivalent of some sort of a synthesis. To be the first one to really understand something, and it's fun. And a lot of times -- it started out with telomerase in the early days. Basically any experiment I would decide to go in and do in the lab would be totally new. There wouldn't be anyone else doing it and I could just go and play. Well, as it is now, Liz and I have both sort of created our own competition in a fairly large way. I mean, the graph of the number of publications with the title "telomerase" in it starts off very low and then goes up more than exponentially. So there are four or five hundred -- already in 2000 -- publications with this title. Whereas, when we started out there was maybe one or two per year. So as a result, there are a lot of other labs that are now doing this -- and a lot of other really good labs that have switched their labs over-- and weren't studying telomerase and now are. So I always tell myself, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

There are some really good people that are now doing this. As a result, there are some experiments we do, but it turns out somebody else has already done them before us. So what we think we could do, to still have fun doing it, is do things that maybe aren't obvious things that are so directly clinically related that we can work with other people to do that, but try and find areas that are still really interesting, where we can come in and just design an experiment and do it on our own.

Dr. Greider, we know you've been involved with ethical issues in research. What are some of the ethical concerns that pertain to your work?

Carol Greider: I don't think there are any particular ethical issues per se in the kind of basic research that we do in the lab, so it's not something that I deal with in my own research day to day. I am on the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and one of the issues that have come up recently is the issue of stem cells. There's a lot of experiments that one can do, it turns out, with these very early cell types, and the idea that we take these cell types and differentiate them into particular kinds of cells, for instance neurons to treat Parkinson's, or pancreas cells to treat diabetes. And telomerase plays in there in a certain realm, because these stem cells have telomerase, or people have proposed putting telomerase back, although in most of them it's already there. So it doesn't really touch that much on my day-to-day research. But the issues play into the abortion debate, because there are questions about if we wanted more to use human embryos, which is where some of these stem cells come from. Not all of them. There are other ways to get these stem cells. And so it has been very interesting to be involved in the various debates. One of the arguments that at least we have come up with on the Bioethics Advisory Commission is that there is a store of frozen embryos around that people had for infertility reasons that aren't going to be used, and that would be a reasonable source ethically. One could use them with the aim of the treatment of disease. I certainly am a proponent of having basic scientists be able to do experiments with those kinds of stem cells.

Another issue that comes up in connection with stem cells is the possibility of cloning. When we were children, that was pure science fiction, but now we've seen Dolly the Sheep and friends.

Carol Greider: Right. Cloning and stem cells also go together because cloning, strictly speaking, is taking the nucleus out from one cell, and putting another nucleus in. So for a lot of these stem cell applications, what people are talking about is if you have a particular disease like diabetes, and we want to take these cells and differentiate them into cells to treat you, the best thing would be if they were immunologically very similar, so you don't have graft rejection kinds of problems. In order to do that, right now the most straightforward way would be to use a kind of cloning technique where you put the nucleus inside the cell. Now that's not what people typically think of when they think of cloning. They think of generating new organisms, and that's a somewhat different issue.

As a scientist, where do you think cloning is going to take us?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Greider: I don't know where cloning is going to take us. One of my immediate concerns is that there is a lot of potential for the cell-based kinds of cloning, and so I don't want us to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think that one can certainly say that you wouldn't want to clone a human being, in terms of implanting a cloned embryo into a human female and having them give birth to a child. That's a very different kind of thing than using cells in culture. The problem is that the terminology gets a little bit muddied, and so I think that we need to speak a little bit more specifically. Certainly, generating individuals the way Dolly was generated -- as an individual sheep in her case -- but individual people, I would think that we would want to definitely avoid that.

But using embryonic stem cells to find cures for human diseases is another matter.

Carol Greider: Curing diabetes and Parkinson's and these other things. I think that it's not one or the other. I think that one can put certain ethical regulations on what we called on the NBAC, colloquially "baby making," the baby-making side of cloning. One can simply say that one won't do that, and still be able to get these other uses out of the cells.

We often discuss the idea of the American Dream. Dr. Blackburn, since you were not born in America, I wonder if you have a particular view on that concept.

Elizabeth Blackburn: I feel very much a recipient of it. I grew up in Australia and then did my Ph.D. in Cambridge in England, and I had a wonderful time being in a scientific environment. There was lots of interchange of ideas, and it was a very exciting time to be doing the kind of science that I was doing. But I also strongly felt that the possibilities would be much more limited in Britain to do science. At the time when I was at this research laboratory in Cambridge, a lot of American postdoctoral fellows would be coming and spending a few years doing research, because it was a very good place to do research of this kind then. I had picked up on this sense, that this was a good place to be doing science, because of the sorts of people I could see, and worked with, one of whom actually became my husband. So I met my husband, who is a Californian, in England and he was one of these people, too.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I just kind of knew that I wanted to come to the U.S. to do science, because I did feel that, also as a woman, and also the British sort of system was such that you had to be kind of much more into it, and in Australia I felt much more constrained. And so this was definitely -- the possibilities, both as a person, even apart from my personal life, fortunately it did coincide -- but it was very much a situation where I could see the U.S. would be the place to be doing science. So it was just a wonderful opportunity. I had the great good fortune of being able to do research at Yale first, as a postdoctoral fellow, and then to go to the University of California at Berkeley for 12 years. What a gift to be given a laboratory and to be told, "Look, you can do research!" What a wonderful thing to be having that opportunity.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

I very much feel I was a recipient of that, living as I do in the West, and living in the Bay Area where the air is just filled with people excited about the future. Right now it's the dot-com, the Internet, and so forth, but all of this sort of permeates. There's a lot of interest in biotech. Some of it is very commercial, but I think much of the frontiers are intellectual, and exciting science frontiers too. You don't need to do commercial things to have exciting challenges, so my personal preference has been in the scientific ones. Part of it is also, I think, particularly that kind of sense that one gets in a place like California. There are lots of interesting possibilities, and you can do things that don't have to be done the way they were before.

What kind of scientist is your husband?

Elizabeth Blackburn: He's a scientist who looks at chromosomes, and he uses very high tech sort of technologies to look at chromosomes. It's very Californian. He looks at chromosomes in ways that people didn't look at them before, so he goes to scientific conferences with people from the jet propulsion labs and astronomy, and he wants to use the kinds of technologies -- and now he does -- that they use to look at a very distant star. You could barely pick it up, so you have to have very sensitive detection. He decided we should use this same technology to look inside cells to pick up very faint signals of light. That's now much more common, to look at cells by this kind of microscopy and this kind of technology. So he works on chromosomes. I just work on the ends, and he works on how they're all arranged -- What are their dynamics? How do they work? -- and trying to apply new technologies to look at them in their live dynamic state.

Dr. Blackburn, what are you looking at now, in terms of the science? Where are you going?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Elizabeth Blackburn: We are very much interested more in the telomere and telomerase as sort of a dynamic system, in which there's a two-way conversation between the telomere and the cells. Telomeres do certain molecular things, and then cells respond, and then the cell talks back to the telomeres. So there's this dynamic conversation that's going on. Before, we tried to get things reduced down to their simplest -- just to even get a handle on it -- and now, instead of thinking of collections of DNAs and proteins, and collection of RNA and proteins -- because telomerase is an RNA protein enzyme -- we're now trying to think of it as a very dynamic process. It is more complicated, but then there are also many more tools in biology. There's chip technologies of various kinds. There are things that you can do now which you could never have done a short while ago.

So there are ways we can answer these much more difficult next-level questions. There's a fascination with how this works, but now I think there's a sort of dynamic aspect to it, which I like, and which I think is where biology is more taking us. We're now seeing more and more the complexities, and starting to venture into trying to deal with them.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The other side of what we do is we are very interested in how this does relate to cancer cells. So while we do experiments in simpler organisms, where we can get fast answers and they are complicated enough as they are, we also are trying to apply certain of these questions directly into human cancer cells and say, "What can we learn there, because there may be directions that could be, eventually, down the line perhaps, therapeutically useful. It would be wonderful to see. So maybe all this medical background is starting to sort of sneak out again, and everybody probably dreams that their research might do some concrete good, but you also know it's a long road, because drugs and therapeutics don't just fall into your lap. They're tough. Humans are complex, and things that work in cells, things that work in molecules really well, it's very complicated how it plays out in the whole human body. So you know, we can have great hopes, but we also know that things may never work out in quite the same way that we planned. But I have a hunch that they'll work out in some way. I'm just not exactly sure how it would play out

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

The scientist in me says, "Well, I hope it turns out to be in some completely different direction," because that would be very intellectually interesting, to see what else is going on, but it would be good to see it turned into something beneficial.

We can be sure it will. Thank you so much, Dr. Blackburn, Dr. Greider. It's been a great pleasure talking to both of you.

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