Elizabeth Blackburn AC (b. 1948) became the first Australian-born female Nobel laureate when she was jointly awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Born in Hobart, she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, undertook her PhD at Cambridge and commenced postdoctoral research at Yale in 1975. She joined the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978; in 1984, she and Carol Greider, who'd been her doctoral student, confirmed the existence of an enzyme, telomerase, which replenishes the telomere – a protective 'cap' at the end of the chromosome – offering hope for cancer treatment and clues to the mystery of ageing. Blackburn moved to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UC San Francisco in 1990. In 2001 she was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics, but was dropped from the council after criticising the Bush administration's negative stance on embryonic stem cell science. President-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research, her many awards include the Heineken Prize, the Lasker Award and the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
Australian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Hugh Hamilton captured this portrait of Blackburn in a boardroom at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus in California. Eager to get back to her research, Blackburn granted Hamilton five minutes to take the photograph.
Purchased with funds provided by Marilyn Darling AC 2011
© Hugh Hamilton/Copyright Agency, 2022
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