Elizabeth Helen Blackburn,
AC,
FRS (born 26 November 1948 in Hobart, Tasmania) is an
Australian-born
American biological researcher at the
University of California, San Francisco, who studies the
telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the
chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered
telomerase, the
enzyme that replenishes the telomere. For this work, she was awarded the 2009
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with
Carol W. Greider and
Jack W. Szostak. She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the
President's Council on Bioethics.
Work in molecular biology
In 1978, Blackburn joined the faculty of the
University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Molecular Biology. In 1990, she moved across the San Francisco Bay to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she served as the Department Chairwoman from 1993 to 1999. Blackburn is currently the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology at UCSF, and a non-resident fellow of the
Salk Institute. She is the president-elect of the
American Association for Cancer Research. In recent years Blackburn and her colleagues have been investigating the effect of stress on telomerase and telomeres with particular emphasis on
mindfulness meditation.
Bioethics
Blackburn was appointed a member of the
President's Council on......
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