Elizabeth Helen Blackburn

She studied Biochemistry in Melbourne University and got her doctorate in Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1975.

She began studying telomeres of eukaryote cells in Yale and later, in 1984, while working in Berkeley, discovers the telomer enzymes, with her collaborator Carol Greider, with whom she shares (and Jack Szostak) the Nobel Prize of Physiology and Medicine in 2009.

In 1993, she is appointed Microbiology and Immunology Department director. She retired in 2004 from the Bioethics Commission in the USA in disagreement with restrictions that Bush imposed in cell research.

Premio L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science in 2008.