Greider, Carol Widney
Carol Widney Greider, 1961–, American molecular biologist, b. San Diego, Calif., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1987. Greider was a researcher and professor at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York from 1987 to 1997, when she joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jack Szostak and Elizabeth Blackburn for solving the problem of how chromosomes make complete copies of themselves during cell division and how they protect themselves against degradation during this process. The researchers demonstrated that the solution lies in the ends of the chromosomes, known as telomeres. Greider and Blackburn identified and characterized telomerase, the enzyme that forms telomeres. The three researchers were credited with adding a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shedding light on disease mechanisms, and stimulating the development of potential new disease therapies.