Elizabeth Blackburn, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her work on the enzyme telomerase, gave a lecture at EPFL in early March.

The full interview of Elizabeth Blackburn is available in EPFL Magazine n°25 (April 2019).

Elizabeth H. Blackburn (born on 26 November 1948) is an Australian-American molecular biologist, researcher at the University of California, San Franscisco.

Her research focuses on telomeres, which are the protective caps that lie at each end of a chromosome and are essential to preserve the genetic information. In 1984, she co-discovered telomerase, an enzyme that helps the chromosome keep its length by producing telomeres. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Greider and Jack W. Szostak.