Elizabeth Blackburn
United States
Elizabeth Blackburn Nobel Prize Winner!
Elizabeth Blackburn is a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research is focused on understanding a critical structure at the end of chromosomes, called the telomere, which protects DNA during the cell division. These small cell structures are thought to provide important clues for fighting chronic diseases and slowing down the aging process. Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Australia but came to the United States in 1975 in order to conduct her postdoctoral work at Yale University. Her discovery for which she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, concerned the process by which cells replicate. Scientists knew that telomeres broke down during cell division, but until Elizabeth discovery they didn’t know how they were repaired afterward. Since her discovery Blackburn has teamed up with doctors from broad range of fields in order to learn more about the restorative potential of telomerase. http://www.makers.com/elizabeth-blackburn