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Elizabeth Blackburn

Molecular biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2009

Australia / United States · b. 1948

Science and medicine

About

Molecular biologist, born in Tasmania, who discovered the enzyme telomerase with Carol Greider. Shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Greider and Jack Szostak. She was a graduate student with Frederick Sanger in Cambridge and later worked at the University of California, San Francisco.

2 answers

Question Which teacher, parent, coach or friend most made you who you are, and what did you learn from them? Relationships read 66 other answers →
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.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview source ↗
Question What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong? Values & belief read 81 other answers →
Yes, and, I'll turn your comment around and say it's fairly close to the biological ratio of men and women. It's all the other fields that are aberrant. … This is the normal field, right? Because it is a much more even distribution between men and women, absolutely.
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded immediately after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 5 October 2009 source ↗

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