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. Blackburn recalls: "Carol had done this experiment, and we sat down, just in the lab, and I rememb...
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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. Blackburn recalls: "Carol had done this experiment, and we sat down, just in the lab, and I remember sort of standing there, and she had this -- we call it a bum. It's an autoradiogram, because there was trace amounts of radioactivity that were used to develop an image of the separated DNA products of what turned out to be the telomerase enzyme reaction. I remember looking at it and just thinking, ‘Ah! This could be very big. This looks just right.’ It had a pattern to it. There was a regularity to it. There was something that was not just sort of garbage there, and that was really kind of coming through, even though we look back at it now...
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