University of California, San Francisco

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS is an Australian-born American biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies... the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. Blackburn recalls: "Carol had done this experiment, and we stood, just in the lab, and I remember sort of standing there, and she had this -- we call it a gel. It's an autoradiogram, because there was trace amounts of radioactivity that were used to develop an image of the separated DNA products of what turned out to be the telomerase enzyme reaction. I remember looking at it and just thinking, ‘Ah! This could be very big. This looks just right.’ It had a pattern to it. There was a regularity to it. There was something that was not just sort of garbage there, and that was really kind of coming through, even though we look back at it now, we'd say, technically, there was this, that and the other, but it was a pattern shining through, and it just had this sort of sense, ‘Ah! There's something real here.
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John Michael Bishop is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and was co-winner of... 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize. He currently serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco. Bishop was born in Pennsylvania. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate, where he was a brother of the Theta-Pi Zeta chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha International Fraternity. He later attended Harvard University where he earned an MD in 1962. He began his career working for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health. He then spent a year working for the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, Germany before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. Bishop has remained on the school's faculty since 1968, and was chancellor of the university from 1998-2009. He is Director of the Bishop Lab. Bishop is best known for his Nobel-winning work on retroviral oncogenes. Working with Harold E. Varmus in the 1980s, he discovered the first human oncogene, c-Src.
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Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. Currently the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University... of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his prion research. Prusiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa and spent his childhood in Des Moines and Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended Walnut Hills High School. Prusiner received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and later received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Prusiner then completed an internship in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Later Prusiner moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he studied glutaminases in E. coli in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman. After three years at NIH, Prusiner returned to UCSF to complete a residency in neurology.
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Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS is an Australian-born American biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies... the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. Blackburn recalls: "Carol had done this experiment, and we stood, just in the lab, and I remember sort of standing there, and she had this -- we call it a gel. It's an autoradiogram, because there was trace amounts of radioactivity that were used to develop an image of the separated DNA products of what turned out to be the telomerase enzyme reaction. I remember looking at it and just thinking, ‘Ah! This could be very big. This looks just right.’ It had a pattern to it. There was a regularity to it. There was something that was not just sort of garbage there, and that was really kind of coming through, even though we look back at it now, we'd say, technically, there was this, that and the other, but it was a pattern shining through, and it just had this sort of sense, ‘Ah! There's something real here.
more