Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA

by Catherine Brady

Her lifelong preference for working in an academic environment rather than a biotech company stems from a similar resistance to pursuing work for the sake of a predefined goal: “I don’t want anybody to be telling me what to do. In clinical research, there’s a goal and only one answer: it works. To me, that’s technology, and I don’t find that kind of goal-oriented problem solving as interesting to do, though I want it to be done. It would be great if that’s the outcome of this research, but it’s not my excitement. In the process of doing work that may turn out to provide useful therapy, we’re learning how cancer cells are responding, and that’s what really interests me. Logically speaking, if this was all about the goal, you’d focus on that and nothing else. But you’d be crazy not to look around to try to understand what cells reveal.” Lateral thinking—“looking around” rather than focusing on a narrowly defined goal—is essential to Blackburn’s definition of intellectual scientific inquiry.