Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel laureate and biological researcher
Elizabeth Blackburn is an Australian-American scientist who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for co-discovering telomerase.
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Born 1948 in Hobart, Australia
About Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1948. She is a biological researcher who studied telomeres, the structures at the ends of chromosomes that protect them. In 1984 she and Carol W. Greider discovered telomerase, an enzyme that rebuilds the telomere. For that work she shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Greider and Jack W. Szostak, and she was the first Australian woman to win a Nobel Prize. She did research at the University of California, San Francisco, and has served as president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Blackburn also worked in medical ethics. She was dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics under the Bush administration, and 170 scientists signed an open letter backing her. Her book in our catalog is The Telomere Effect.