Carol W. Greider

Carol Greider is Professor of Oncology, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biology, and Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1984, working together with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Jack Szostak, she discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomeres, or chromosome ends. In 1988, Dr. Greider moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where, as an independent Cold Spring Harbor Fellow, she cloned and characterized the RNA component of telomerase. Over the course of her career, Greider expanded the focus of her telomere research to include the role of telomere length in cellular senescence, cell death and in cancer. She was able to determine the secondary structure of the human telomerase RNA and characterize the loss of telomere function in mice, which allowed an understanding of human short telomere diseases such as bone marrow and other stem cell failure diseases. Greider shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 with Drs. Blackburn and Szostak for their work on telomeres and telomerase. Writing of this work in Nature Medicine with her co-awardees, Greider reflects: “The quiet beginnings of telomerase research emphasize the importance of basic, curiosity-driven research. At the time that it is conducted, such research has no apparent practical applications. Our understanding of the way the world works is fragmentary and incomplete, which means that progress does not occur in a simple, direct and linear manner. It is important to connect the unconnected, to make leaps and to take risks, and to have fun talking and playing with ideas that might at first seem outlandish.” Greider currently directs a group of eight scientists studying both the role of short telomeres in age-related disease and cancer as well as the regulatory mechanism that maintain telomere length at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In addition to her Nobel Prize, Greider has received numerous accolades for her work including the Richard Lounsbery Award, the Albert Lasker Award, the Wiley Prize, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, and the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. In addition to her American Academy of Arts and Sciences Membership, she is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology. Her scientific articles have been prolifically cited, and occur in prominent journals as Cell, Nature, and Science.