Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

I would like to express my gratitude to the Lasker Foundation, and to Joe Goldstein and the other members of the jury, for this Award.

I am particularly happy to be recognized for my work on telomeres for several reasons—for one, the work was done so long ago that it has sometimes seemed to me to be almost forgotten. I am grateful to the jury for digging so deeply into the history of this field! Since then, I've worked in several rather different areas, but the experiment that Liz and I collaborated on, putting Tetrahymena telomeres into yeast, has always been one of my favorites.

I still remember discussing the idea with Liz at a Gordon Conference, and then the excitement when it actually worked and all of a sudden the door was opened to a whole series of new possibilities. To me, this experiment illustrates perfectly the value of talking to people who work in very different fields, the value of collaboration, and the value of, every now and then, putting a little money and effort into high risk, high payoff experiments.

It is a particular delight to be sharing this Award with Liz Blackburn, my collaborator from so long ago, and with Carol Greider, Liz's former student who has done so much to develop the biochemistry of telomerase. When we did our work 20, 25 years ago, none of us could have anticipated the significance of the molecular biology of telomeres to aging and cancer. Our work was purely curiosity-driven basic science, and the biomedical significance emerged only later. I thank the Lasker Foundation once again for this recognition of our early work, and for their continued public support of basic research.