Carol W. Greider

Federal funding for biomedical sciences plays a critical role in training the next generation of scientists.

Science can promote an understanding between people at a really fundamental level.

I think actively promoting women in science is very important because the data has certainly shown that there has been an underrepresentation.

I enjoyed biology in high school, and that brought me to a research lab at U.C. Santa Barbara. I loved doing experiments, and I had fun with them. I realized this kind of problem-solving fit my intellectual style.

In junior high school, I learned that I could be good at school. I remember liking the freedom to choose classes and the pleasure of learning and doing well. My perseverance and love of reading had somehow allowed me to overcome many disadvantages of dyslexia, and I read a lot of books for pleasure.

It takes years to realize the multiple benefits of science; without adequate, sustained funding for research, the careers of many bright, young scientists may come to a screeching halt.

I finished my Ph.D. at Berkeley in November 1987 and took a position as an independent fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in January 1988.

My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.

Students and postdoctoral fellows largely depend on the support of the public sector to finance the training and research that will make them world-renowned scientists.

As a kid, I thought of myself as stupid because I needed remedial help. It was not until much later that I figured out that I was dyslexic and that my trouble with spelling and sounding out words did not mean I was stupid, but early impressions stuck with me and colored my world for a time.

In 1978, Elizabeth Blackburn, working with Joe Gall, identified the DNA sequence of telomeres. Every time a cell divides, it gets shorter. But telomeres usually don't. So there must be something happening to the telomeres to keep their length in equilibrium.

One of the lessons I have learned in the different stages of my career is that science is not done alone. It is through talking with others and sharing that progress is made.