Big Think Interview With Carol Greider | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Carol Greider

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A conversation with the Johns Hopkins University molecular biologist and co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

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Carol W. Greider:

Carol W. Greider is the Daniel Nathans Professor & Director of Molecular Biology & Genetics at Johns Hopkins University. Her research on telomerase (an enzyme she helped discover) and telomere function won her a 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Prior to joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, she obtained a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997, and was a faculty member at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the 1998 Gairdner Foundation International Award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Have you encountered any gender-specific obstacles as a scientist?

Carol Greider: I think that that's a very complicated kind of question, because although I really feel like I never had a particular obstacle that I had to overcome as a female scientist—I never felt that I was singled out or had anything done against me—I do see that when one looks at where women are in science that there is a very large discrepancy, and that there does seem to be an inability for women to get to higher echelons in the scientific hierarchy or in academia. So I think that although I didn't feel like I had anything done personally to me, I think that there may be more subtle social interactions at play in the scientific world that does have a little bit of a negative effect on women advancing in their careers.

Question: What can be done to remove these obstacles?

Carol Greider: I think that as more women get into higher levels of science, and as it's very clear to younger women coming into the field that yes, it is possible to get to the higher ranks, that will help. And also I think that the way that women run meetings, and when the power structure is such that you have a larger representation of women at higher levels, that the conversation may change somewhat. And so that could also be helpful moving forward.

Question: What is your advice to female scientists starting out today?

Carol Greider: Just follow what you're excited about. I would say the same thing to female scientists as to male scientists, to all young people, really: the fun thing is to be able to do something that excites you. A lot of times what we do is a lot of hard work, but hard work is actually okay if you really are engaged in it. And so that really, I think, is the main thing, is find something that you're passionate about and be able to follow that.

Question: How did it feel to win the Nobel Prize?

Carol Greider: That was very exciting. It was a tremendous honor to get a phone call from Stockholm and to share it with Elizabeth Blackburn, who I've worked with for many years, as well as Jack Szostak. So I was very excited, and I was very happy that I got to share the day with my children. I was able to wake them up at five o'clock in the morning after I got this phone call and to have them there with me to share and to celebrate.

Question: What role did you and your co-winners each play in the prizewinning research?

Carol Greider: Yeah, Liz Blackburn and Jack Szostak had a collaboration in the early 1980s where they were interested in trying to understand the function of telomeres. And they had a collaboration which was a cross-country collaboration with one in Berkeley and the other one in Boston. And they would call each other up on the phone and explain experiments and send materials back and forth. And that collaboration resulted in this idea that there may be some way that the cells have of maintaining their chromosome ends. It was known that chromosome ends would shorten every time a cell divided, and in doing a collaboration to try and understand the functional components that make up the telomeres they proposed that there may be an enzyme that lengthens telomeres. And so then when I went to graduate school at U.C. Berkeley and I met Liz Blackburn, that was the project—after I had worked on a smaller project in her lab—that was the project that I thought was the most exciting to follow up on and find out, is there really going to be this hypothesized enzyme which can lengthen telomeres? So that's when I started to work with Liz Blackburn, and it was together in her laboratory that we discovered the enzyme telomerase.

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