Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

People tend to look to see what others are reading on a plane. Usually I’m reading the kind of things that makes them look at me funny and turn away. Oddly, with Catherine Brady’s book it was different. Three different people on different planes (it is a long, rich book that takes a while to read through carefully and really absorb) saw the friendly smiling face on the cover and asked me about the book. Two of those wrote down the title. There is something quite intriguing about Blackburn, telomeres, DNA, and the successes of a woman scientist that seems to attract broad interest. Fortunately, Brady has given us a marvelous book that will satisfy a wide variety of appetites.

Brady gives us Blackburn the scientist. This is not a biography of the sort where we learn intimate details about her life. Yes, she is married to another scientist, and she has a son. They appear occasionally, as does her own thinking about her roles as a mother and wife. But the family and personal details are not the focus here. Instead, we see a story of telomeres, in which Elizabeth Blackburn plays a central role. So do Carol Greider, Joseph Gall, and many, many other collaborators, students, post-docs, and colleagues. Science is a team effort, and Brady presents Blackburn as the leader of a team. That she is a brilliant leader of a superbly successful team makes the story enticing. That they have come upon truly innovative work on telomeres and telomerase, which has turned out to be extremely important in cell development and aging as a core biological phenomenon adds further interest. Brady makes the convincing case that Blackburn [End Page 655] is a very likely future Nobel Prize winner, or at the least that she deserves the Prize. Yet Brady also does an excellent job of making it seem that such an award is not particularly important to Blackburn, to science, or to the story of what really matters about understanding telomeres. And Brady does a great job of making the science sound exciting, important, and fun, even while it’s tremendously hard work.

The book is structured like a traditional biography, chronologically. We learn of Blackburn’s early days in Australia, including a biochemistry Master’s degree at the University of Melbourne. Then already on p. 19, it is 1971 and she is off on a four-week trip by ship to Cambridge, U.K., for her graduate education at the Medical Research Council in Fred Sanger’s lab. Australian scholarship in hand, she resolves to work hard and to make her two years of funding (which later became three) cover the three years for a Ph.D. She describes herself as having been happy there, where everybody was immersed in science all the time, and where the atmosphere was wonderfully free. She also met fellow biologist John Sedat, whom she married. From Cambridge, she followed Sedat to Joseph Gall’s lab at Yale, and Brady builds on this episode to develop one of the book’s strong themes.

Blackburn, Brady explains, put on gender blinders. She resolved to believe that a woman could succeed in science by doing the work of a man and not making a point of gender difference. That she followed rather than led was not surprising in the 1970s, and gradually with accumulating experience, Elizabeth Blackburn has come to question some of the assumptions about women’s roles in science. Brady develops those in the context of each chronological step rather than as a separate theme, so that we see Blackburn’s evolving convictions. For several decades, she goes along, settling for what she gets and doing well because she is so outstanding. She sees women colleagues not getting tenure or not getting good offices, but she does not interpret this in gendered terms. Only when she becomes a department chair at UCSF, and when she sees how administrative...