Elizabeth Blackburn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine yesterday, was fired by the Bush administration in 2004 for criticizing White House policies.
Blackburn accepted the award, along with two of her colleagues, for discovering that chromosomes are protected during cell division by their ends, called telomeres, and the enzyme they’re composed of, called telomerase.
Their discovery is yet another clue to the cause of aging.
“Many scientists speculated that telomere shortening could be the reason for ageing, not only in the individual cells but also in the organism as a whole. But the ageing process has turned out to be complex and it is now thought to depend on several different factors, the telomere being one of them,” said the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute in yesterday’s press release.
Before making her prize-winning discovery, Blackburn served on the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-04. In 2004, she was let go after criticizing the council as a political tool for President Bush in The New England Journal of Medicine (subscription required), in particular, for pushing his position on embryonic stem cell research.
Teknocratix wishes to congratulate Blackburn, as well as her colleagues Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for their discovery and award.