![\"Carolyn](\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Carolyn_Widney_Greider.jpg\")
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(Tom: I often read of biological indicators or markers but rarely how they were discoverd.)<\/p>\n
On the morning of Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of December, 1984, in the radiation laboratory of Stanley Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, a twenty-three-year-old American molecular biology graduate student named Carolyn Widney Greider, who had been working alone in the laboratory through the holiday week on the seventh month of a doctoral thesis project assigned to her by her dissertation advisor, the Australian-American biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn, walked out of the photographic darkroom holding a single sheet of X-ray film. The film, which Greider had exposed against an autoradiogram of the previous evening’s experimental run on extracts of the freshwater single-celled organism Tetrahymena thermophila, showed what Greider has subsequently described in her preserved laboratory notebook as a distinct ladder of dark bands climbing the film in approximately six-base-pair intervals. The bands were, in the working hypothesis of the Blackburn laboratory, the first physical evidence of an enzyme that no scientific paper in the world had yet documented.<\/p>\n
The enzyme would, in the subsequent literature, be named telomerase.<\/p>\n
Carolyn Widney Greider had been born on the fifteenth of April, 1961, in San Diego, California, to a physics professor at the University of California named Kenneth Greider. Her mother had died when Carolyn was seven years old. She had been diagnosed in elementary school with developmental dyslexia, which had assigned her to the remedial reading sections of her elementary school’s curriculum. She had compensated, by her own subsequent description, by memorizing the visual shape of English words rather than sounding them out phonetically.<\/p>\n
She had completed her undergraduate degree in biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1983, with a one-year intervening period of study in marine biology at the University of G\u00f6ttingen in Germany. She had applied to thirteen American graduate programs in molecular biology. Six of the programs had rejected her application on the basis of her Graduate Record Examination scores, which her dyslexia had made consistently low across the standardized testing she had taken throughout her academic career. Two programs had accepted her on the basis of her undergraduate research record. One of those programs had been the molecular biology department at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n
She had enrolled at Berkeley in September of 1984. She had joined, in her first month of graduate study, the laboratory of Elizabeth Blackburn, who at the time was a thirty-five-year-old Australian-born biochemist who was investigating the structure of the protective DNA caps at the ends of chromosomes \u2014 the structures Blackburn had named telomeres in her own postdoctoral work at Yale in the late nineteen-seventies.<\/p>\n
Blackburn had hypothesized that an unidentified enzyme must be responsible for the maintenance of telomere length across successive cellular divisions. Several senior researchers in the field had questioned whether such an enzyme existed at all.<\/p>\n
Blackburn had assigned the search to her new graduate student. Greider had spent the subsequent six months running variations of the same biochemical assay \u2014 preparing extracts from Tetrahymena thermophila, adding synthetic telomere-length DNA primers, and visualizing the products on autoradiograms. The first five months had produced no clear evidence of the hypothesized enzyme.<\/p>\n
In November of 1984, Greider had switched, on her own initiative, to a smaller synthetic DNA primer than the one she had been using. The smaller primer had increased the number of available substrate ends by approximately a thousand-fold. The experimental run that produced the Christmas Day autoradiogram had used the new primer.<\/p>\n
The result, when she developed the film, was the documented ladder of repeating six-base-pair bands.<\/p>\n
Greider, by her own subsequent description, went home that afternoon and danced for several hours to the recording of the Bruce Springsteen album Born in the U.S.A. that she had been playing in her graduate-student apartment that semester.<\/p>\n
She and Blackburn spent the subsequent twelve months replicating the result and characterizing the enzyme. They submitted their findings to the journal Cell in October of 1985. The paper was published in the December 1985 issue.<\/p>\n
Greider completed her doctoral dissertation at Berkeley in 1987. She moved, the following year, to a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory fellowship on Long Island, New York, where she continued the molecular characterization of the enzyme she and Blackburn had by then renamed telomerase.<\/p>\n
She received the call from Stockholm, on the morning of the fifth of October, 2009, at approximately five o’clock in the morning, while folding laundry at her home in the Baltimore suburb where she was at the time the Daniel Nathans Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was being awarded to her, to Blackburn, and to the Harvard biochemist Jack Szostak.<\/p>\n
She is now sixty-five years old. She moved her laboratory to the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2020, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Tom: I often read of biological indicators or markers but rarely how they were discoverd.) On the morning of Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of December, 1984, in the radiation laboratory of Stanley Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, a twenty-three-year-old American molecular biology graduate student named Carolyn Widney Greider, who had been working alone in … <\/p>\n