Elizabeth Blackburn: the First Aussie Woman who Won the Nobel Prize!

She was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1948, and graduated from Melbourne
Uni in 1970. Then she got her Ph. D. at University of Cambridge in 1975,
and started working at University of California at Berkeley. In 1982, she
and Jack Szotak at Harvard Medical School (Dana Farber Cancer Center)
jointly discovered the "telomeres" at the end of chromosomes in yeast.
In 1984, she and her Ph.D. student Carol Greider jointly discovered
a new enzyme called "Telomerase" which extends the telomeres.

This year Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF, Carol Greider at Johns Hopkins University
and Jack Szotak at Harvard University (MGH) share the 2009 Nobel prize
for their pioneering work on Telomere and Telomerase.

Abnormal activation of Telomerase (or extension of telomeres) is a cause of
human(but not mouse) cancers which prevents normal cells from the senescence
(programmed cell death).

Interestingly human telomeres are far shorter than mouse counterparts. So
in general human normal cells are shorter-lived than mouse counterparts.
That is why it is very hard to establish "immortal" human normal cell lines.
For every time each cell divides, its telomers get shorter, and in the end
when its telomeres almost disappear, the cell is bound to die. Like a blasting
fuse linked to dynamite, shortening of telomeres leads to the burst of cells.

However, when human normal cells are transformed by tumor viruses such
as HPV, they are immortalized, because these viruses contain a gene for telomerase
which could extend the telomeres. The best known example is a human cervical
cancer cell line called "HeLa" which is transformed by HPV.

In principle, anti-telomerase drugs would be anti-cancer drugs potentially
useful for the therapy of human (but not mouse) cancers. In other words,
the anti-cancer efficacy of these anti-telomerase drugs could not be tested
in mouse cancer models. That might be a reason why the development of anti-telomerase drugs has been so slow.

Actually I have never met this Aussie-American scientist,
but I have spoken Carol Greider once as I invited her
among the speakers to our 1998 NY Academy of Sciences symposium
on Anti-cancer molecules which I organized at Rockefeller University.