Profile of Nobel Prize Winner Carol Greider, a Johns Hopkins Molecular Biologist - washingtonpost.com: Partway through an interview, Carol Greider's cellphone emits the special ring she has set to indicate the caller is one of her two children. Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins who this year became one of only 10 women to win the Nobel Prize in medicine, is at her phone in a split second. The caller is her 9-year-old daughter, Gwendolyn, who has gotten out of school.
'How was Spirit Day?' Greider asks. They chat -- a babysitter is at home -- then she rings off. Nearby is a pile of handmade cards from Gwendolyn's fourth-grade class, the members of which have different ideas about for what, exactly, Greider has won the prize.
Twenty-five years ago, as an exceptionally gifted graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Greider, now 48, visited her lab to check an experiment, and discovered evidence of an enzyme called telomerase. The enzyme helps maintain telomeres, the caplike structures that protect the ends of chromosomes. The discovery was a breakthrough -- telomerase is implicated in cancer and genetic disease -- the import of which would become clearer over time, as possible therapies emerged.
