PROFILE: Carol Greider wins Nobel Medicine Prize despite dyslexia

Oct 5, 2009, 17:38 GMT

New York - Molecular biologist Carol W Greider, 48, is the youngest of the three researchers awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday.

She shares the honour with US researchers Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak for discoveries important to knowledge about cancer, ageing and inherited genetic diseases.

As someone who suffers from dyslexia, she presumably had a very rough start in learning. However, during her first years of study at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Greider became fascinated by discoveries in the lab, she told the German Press Agency dpa Monday after hearing the news from Stockholm.

Elizabeth Blackburn, who promoted Greider's work and with whom she shares the highest award for a scientist, describes her young colleague as 'rigorous and enterprising' in her work.

While Greider answered questions over the telephone, her 9-year- old daughter and her 13-year-old son browsed the website of the Nobel Prize Committee for information on their suddenly-famous mother and her work.

'They are coming to the lab with me today to celebrate. I'm not sending them to school, that's why both of them are quite excited,' the researcher said.

The big news from the Nobel committee came while Greider was not at home.

'At that time of day I'm usually out exercising, riding my bike or swimming. I have reserved the time between 5 and 7 in the morning for exercising,' she told dpa.

Following the discovery of the enzyme telomerase in her mentor Blackburn's lab at the University of California at Berkeley, Greider moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, near New York.

There, she continued her research on the role of telomerase in the emergence of cancer and other degenerative diseases, testing it on mice among others.

In 1997, Greider and her husband, Nathaniel, moved on to universities that allowed them to work near each other in the area around Washington.

Carol Greider took charge of a lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she works with several young students. Her husband, in turn, has joined George Washington University in the capital.