



Nobel crusader for women in science


Andrew Darby, Hobart

AFLOAT on a sea of congratulations, Elizabeth Blackburn, Australia's first female Nobel Prize winner, made time to remember what got her there. ''All science happens through collaboration,'' she said. ''But I suppose there is an element of 'chance favours the prepared mind'.''

She was well prepared yesterday. Dazed though she felt after waking at 2am in San Francisco for the news from Stockholm, Dr Blackburn pushed the cause of women in science as strongly as she did her own endeavours.

Speaking to The Age, she wanted a better deal for women scientists who also choose motherhood, just as much as she wanted to get across the intrigue of scientific discovery.

Dr Blackburn, 60, was described by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as an inspiration, especially to young women, who placed as much weight on the ethics of research as scientific practice itself. She was recognised with two former graduate students, Americans Jack Szostak and Carol Greider, for their work on telomeres, caps that protect chromosomes in cells, and telomerase, an enzyme that does the protecting.

She draws an analogy between the elongated shapes of chromosomes and shoelaces: telomeres on chromosomes are like the caps on the end of laces that stop them from fraying; telomerase is the enzyme that ensures this job is done.

At a time when commercial research is pressing harder on scientists, the Blackburn-led work is seen as proof of the value of research to solve a fundamental biological question.

Since the trio's discoveries, more links have been made between telomeres and cancer, the ageing process and the effects of stress. In cancer, for example, it may be possible to develop drugs that block telomerase, on which 85 per cent of cancers depend for growth.

Some of her current students are pursuing a link between chronic stress and telomere damage. ''To me that's just fascinating, because it relates to what a lot of humanity undergoes,'' she said.

Her engagement with science began with what she said was the ''privilege of a terrific education'' in Australia for her, one of seven children to two doctors. Now working in a laboratory named after her at the University of California, she still felt ties to the chemistry lab at Broadland girls school in Launceston, where she mixed fizzy chemicals in the 1960s.

''I think curiosity-driven science starts in labs like that.''

She went to University High School in Melbourne, and then Melbourne University, when early feminism was breaking academic barriers, and said it didn't strike her as unusual to be a woman doing science.

''I was in an undergraduate department, biochemistry, where there were a number of very distinguished women professors,'' she said.

Dr Blackburn, a mother of one, believes a more imaginative structuring of career pathways - to allow for having a family - would save a huge loss of talent from research.

? Three United States scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fibre-optic networks have shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics.

Charles Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fibre optics. His 1966 discovery became the backbone of communication networks that carry phone calls and high-speed internet data around the world.

Willard Boyle and George Smith were honoured for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor - the eye of the digital camera found in everything from the cheapest point-and-shoot to delicate surgical instruments.

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