With her trademark determination and willingness to state some inconvenient truths, Nobel laureate Professor Elizabeth Blackburn has spoken up for science throughout her career.
As a young woman embarking on a career in science, Elizabeth Blackburn didn’t set out to change the world. Coming across a biography of Marie Curie at the impressionable age of 11 or 12 left an indelible mark, but it was Curie’s love of science and dedication to fundamental research, more than the efforts to apply her discoveries to treatments for cancer, that spoke to Blackburn at the time.
“I thought doing good science was a sort of value in itself,” says Blackburn. “We are enriched by learning how nature and humans work.”
Several decades, three continents, more than 300 journal publications, a New York Times bestseller and a Nobel Prize later, Blackburn remains a staunch advocate of basic research and a leader in communicating the significance of scientific findings to audiences outside the scientific community – from politicians to the general public.
Curiosity and deep focus
Growing up in the 1960s in Tasmania, Blackburn was captivated by the natural world. As a child she would pick up jellyfish and ants. This early fascination grew into a deep curiosity about how living things worked, which persists to this day.
Blackburn completed a bachelor of science and masters of science, majoring in biochemistry, at the University of Melbourne before heading to the University of Cambridge in the UK. There, she undertook a PhD in molecular biology in the lab of British biochemist and Nobel Laureate Frederick Sanger.
During her time in Sanger’s lab, working on a method to sequence DNA, Blackburn realised the depth of focus that would be required to effectively target the “tough experimental questions” about the chemical reactions that allow living organisms to grow and reproduce. “You had to delve really deeply into: How do molecules work? How do they interact? What are they doing?” she says.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in 1975, Blackburn joined the lab of Joseph Gall, a pioneering cell biologist in the field of chromosome structure and function. She applied the DNA sequencing technique from her PhD research to the ends of chromosomes (known as telomeres) in a single-celled organism called Tetrahymena thermophila. This laid the groundwork for investigating the role of telomeres further, in her own laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, work that earned Blackburn and her collaborators Jack Szostak and Carol Greider the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Their discoveries were two-fold: firstly, telomeres were shown to function as protective caps that preserve genetic information in chromosomes when DNA molecules are copied in the process of cell division. Secondly, Blackburn and Greider discovered telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the telomeres.
Seeing the bigger picture
Once she had figured out the fundamentals of telomeres, Blackburn was free to “widen out” her thinking and consider what this could mean for human health. Now at the University of California, San Francisco, she collaborated with researchers in the medical sciences and psychology to gain new perspectives.
“You bring your deep focus and others bring their deep focus and then you can interact and collaborate with people who are also really good at what they do,” she says.
Over a lifetime, our telomeres wear down and become shorter. This leads to faster ageing of our cells and increases the risk of associated conditions such as stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Since the fundamental discoveries about telomeres and telomerase were made, geneticists, social scientists and epidemiologists have built a body of work that supports the idea that we can reduce telomere shortening – literally change our DNA – through lifestyle choices such as getting enough sleep and exercise and limiting chronic stress.
In 2017, Blackburn and long-time collaborator, health psychologist Elissa Epel’s book, The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer, was published, and became an instant best-seller. It shared their research findings in a way that people could readily apply to their lives and explained how social stressors such as racism have a quantifiable negative effect on the telomere length of those experiencing them. The book has since been translated into 30 languages.
Say it as you see it
By widening her perspective from the lab to the world outside, Blackburn has developed an interest in the intersection of science and public policy. When she was invited by US President George W Bush to sit on the President’s Council for Bioethics in 2001, she saw it as an opportunity to contribute to policy discussion. Three years earlier, human embryonic stem cells had been isolated for the first time, and their use in research had become a contentious topic.
“There was a lot of ideological political discussion about stem cells because it got all tied in with all these other hot-button issues,” says Blackburn.
Blackburn became increasingly concerned by the disregard for science that was evident in discussions and in the final reports of the council. When her revisions to the reports were ignored, she and fellow committee member Janet Rowley wrote a critique that was published in PLOS Biology in 2004, drawing attention to the inaccuracies and misrepresentations of scientific findings in the reports.
“I wasn’t very political,” Blackburn admits. “I just said what I thought and that wasn’t really to the taste, I think, of the administration.”
Sure enough, Blackburn was dismissed from the council, a move that attracted a lot of media attention and generated a groundswell of support.
“It was a touchstone for a bigger problem,” she says. At the time, there were growing suspicions that the White House was actively interfering and suppressing evidence in relation to the Iraq War and the projected effects of climate change.
In recent years, it’s public suspicion or distrust of science that has been weighing on Blackburn’s mind. She has mulled over what changes might help foster greater trust and in 2018 issued the challenge to 600 young scientists at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.
Through a process of collaboration, the Lindau Guidelines, a set of 10 goals for scientific research and conduct, were drawn up and endorsed by Nobel Laureates in 2020. The aim is to create a new approach for global, sustainable and cooperative open science and a playbook of sorts for young scientists: “How to be a scientist and keep it an honourable profession,” Blackburn says. Without doubt, she makes an excellent role model.
Article by Kate Arneman