Carol Greider: unravelling the science of telomeres and telomerase. Interview by Stephen Pincock.

摘要

Investigating the inner workings of pond scum may not be everyone's idea of holiday fun, but for Carol Greider-who shared this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine-the decision to spend Christmas Day, 1984, in the lab was one she has never had cause to regret. That year, Greider was a 23-year-old graduate student in the laboratory of Elizabeth Blackburn, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley CA, USA, who was investigating telomeres-repeated patterns of DNA that serve as protective tips at the ends of chromosomes, something like the plastic tips that stop shoe-laces unravelling. Blackburn and another researcher, Jack Szostak, from the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, had discovered telomeres several years previously, and knew that there had to be some mechanism to stop them shortening every time a cell divided. The big question was how this worked-Blackburn and Szostak suspected it was an enzyme, but others thought it happened via some kind of recombination.