Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

It is indeed an honor to receive the Lasker Award. Working on telomeres and telomerase over the past 20 years has taken me on a ride though many disciplines in biology, from biochemistry to cellular senescence and aging, to recombination, the DNA damage response, and cancer. Today, we are delving into human genetics and stem cell biology. I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in these different research communities, to make new friends and collaborators, and to be exposed to new ideas and questions.

The most important lesson I have learned on this ride is that science is inherently a community activity. Ideas are created by thinking about your own experiments in the context of established knowledge and also thinking hard about other people's experiments. When new ideas emerge they are discussed, critiqued and modified. Often this process goes on unacknowledged. It is the exchange of ideas with the members of my laboratory that I find most exciting. Good ideas for the next most interesting experiments can come from many places; in my lab they almost always come from the students and postdocs who work with me. This lesson—that science is a community activity—is one of the most rewarding that I have learned.

I am grateful for the opportunity this award presents me to give back to the scientific community, by advocating the importance of fundamental, curiosity-driven research. The true value of high-profile awards is that it gives one the chance to explain publicly the nature of the scientific process and the importance of basic, non-applied work. Telomerase beautifully illustrates that you never know where medically relevant discoveries might come from. From studying Tetrahymena and yeast, we learn about cancer and stem cells. It has been a thrilling 20-year ride, I cannot wait to see where telomeres and telomerase will lead us in the next 20 years.