Professor Elizabeth Blackburn
winner of the Nobel Prize!

A Swarm of Bee Goddesses
Tending a Telomere
painting by Julie Newdoll
The purple flowers in this painting represents the end
of a condensed chromosome, capped off at the end
with a hive that symbolizes a telomere. Telomeres in
part serve to protect each chromosome by preventing
them from unravelling, sticking to other chromosomes,
being chewed away by enzymes and the like. Various
proteins, such as telomerase, help to protect the telomere
and lengthen it when needed. The most current
understanding about how proteins interact with the
telomere has been described by Elizabeth Blackburn as
“bees buzzing around a hive rather than a rigidly interlocked
defensive wall.”* Blackburn discovered telomerase
and pioneered the field of telomere research.
Bees have a long history with human kind, and
ancient rings show goddesses as bees from Sumerian
times. The artist found it fitting that in a field
pioneered by a woman, which includes many prominent
women scientists who have benefitted from her
guidance, a Queen Bee and her Priestesses should be
used to represent the proteins swarming about the
telomere “hive”.

*From page 205 of the book “Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of
Telomeres” by Catherine Brady, The MIT Press, 2007, and personal
communication with Professor Blackburn.