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Greider’s Nobel Prize Comes As No Surprise
Submitted by Lin Mantell, SOT Member
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Lin Mantell |
According to SOT member Dr. Lin Mantell learning that Carol Greider was one of three scientists to be awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine came as no surprise. “She is an extraordinary person and an incredibly smart scientist. I am not surprised that she was selected. I was very happy for her. She deserves this honor,” Dr. Mantell said.
In 1991, Dr. Mantell, was one of eight students/postdoctoral fellows working in Dr. Greider’s laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. “Everyone was working on their own system. Carol made all of us feel at home and she always treated us as colleagues. I never felt like she was my boss. She was doing the best science, but she never made anyone feel like we could not approach her or ask her advice about something we were doing. She made me feel like I could achieve the impossible,” she explained. Dr. Mantell, whose specialty is cardiopulmonary toxicology, went on to become an associate professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at St. John's University College of Pharmacy and Director, Cardiopulmonary Research at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. For Dr. Mantell, Dr. Greider did an outstanding job of taking things to the next level. “I was working on a basic biology question, and Carol did a great job of connecting every question I had to larger questions, and then she would ask what does this mean for a patient in the ward? “My laboratory is currently working on oxygen toxicity. Working at Carol’s lab certainly had a tremendous influence on what I really want to do and what I pursued,” the Associate Professor said.
Two other lab mates would also agree with Dr. Mantell’s assessment of the Nobel Laureate. Stephanie Goldsmith started working in the Greider lab two years before Dr. Mantell. She was only one year out of college and had never worked in a laboratory setting. “Dr. Greider trained me from the ground up. I was her technician and eventually her lab manager. She trained me at the bench and was a wonderful mentor. She was like a colleague, though. She did whatever had to be done regardless of her role and she did it well. ” Mrs. Goldsmith noted.
Mrs. Goldsmith left the New York lab after Dr. Greider moved the lab to Baltimore and went to work at SUNY Stonybrook. After some time there, she moved to Baltimore and worked for four more years for Dr. Greider at Johns Hopkins University. In 2002, she returned to New York and has been working as a laboratory manager in the protein crystallography lab of HHM1 investigator Leemor Joshua-Tor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Mrs. Goldsmith says that Dr. Greider received many awards over the years, but she would rarely make a point to inform the staff of her accomplishments. “There was no pretense about her. She was always so humble. We would learn about some award she had received, but she would rarely tell us herself. Her loyalty was to the pursuit of knowledge and academics, not fame or glory. Everything great that has happened to her is because she followed her curiosity, pursued the answers to questions she had, strived toward excellence and helped those around her to be successful.” Mrs. Goldsmith said.
Alyson Kass-Eisler, a Curriculum Director and Postdoctoral Program Officer of Watson School of Biological Sciences, also worked in the same lab with Mrs. Goldsmith and Dr. Mantell. “I was always impressed by her intelligence and the way she ran the lab. She was open and helped you pursue what you wanted to and she would help guide you in that direction. I had always heard what a good lecturer she was, but I was more impressed by the way she taught and her openness,” said Dr. Kass-Eisler.
All three former trainees agree that Dr. Greider was a loyal teacher and a brilliant scientist. They also agree that the Nobel Prize will not be her last honor. They fully expect that great things will still come her way.
Dr. Greider graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, with a B.A. in Biology. She completed her Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1987 from the University of California at Berkeley under Elizabeth Blackburn, who shares, along with Jack Szostak, the Nobel Prize in Medicine with her. During her work at Berkeley, Dr. Greider discovered the enzyme called telomerase, which protects chromosomes at the end of DNA from being destroyed, being fused together, or rearranging themselves, which in turn, can cause abnormalities that can lead to cancer. Dr. Greider went to Cold Spring Laboratory as a junior faculty fellow and continued her work on telomerase. She only worked in the lab for three years before she became a regular faculty member. In 1997, she went to Johns Hopkins University where she is a Daniel Nathans Professor and the Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University.
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