Victoria Lundblad is an American

geneticist A geneticist is a biologist or physician who studies genetics, the science of genes, heredity, and variation of organisms. A geneticist can be employed as a scientist or a lecturer. Geneticists may perform general research on genetic processe ...

whose work focuses on the genetic control of

chromosome A chromosome is a long DNA molecule with part or all of the genetic material of an organism. In most chromosomes the very long thin DNA fibers are coated with packaging proteins; in eukaryotic cells the most important of these proteins are ...

behavior in

yeast Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom. The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and at least 1,500 species are currently recognized. They are estimated to constitut ...

. Many of her discoveries have concerned

telomerase Telomerase, also called terminal transferase, is a ribonucleoprotein that adds a species-dependent telomere repeat sequence to the 3' end of telomeres. A telomere is a region of repetitive sequences at each end of the chromosomes of most euka ...

, the RNA-containing enzyme that completes the ends of chromosomes. She works at the

Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vacci ...

in La Jolla, California.

Early life and education

Victoria Lundblad was born in the Bay Area of California to a biochemist and a school teacher. Vicki Lundblad was involved in science experiments as early as junior high school, testing whether skin emitted substances that repelled mosquitoes. She then took up playing the cello and threw herself into music studies; arriving at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, she meant to major in mathematics and music. She narrowed it down to Mathematics, but later added Biology. She pursued graduate education in biology at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where she became

Nancy Kleckner Nancy Kleckner is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology at Harvard University and principal investigator at the Kleckner Laboratory at Harvard University. Education Nancy Kleckner worked with Matt Meselson as an undergraduate at Ha ...

's first graduate student. At Harvard, she was excited by a lecture by

Jack Szostak Jack William Szostak (born November 9, 1952) is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, university professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexand ...

, Nobel laureate in 2016, about his work on telomeres with

Elizabeth Blackburn Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, (born 26 November 1948) is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher at the University of California, S ...

. She began a postdoctoral fellowship in 1983, working with Jack Szostak on yeast with a defective telomerase that underwent early

senescence Senescence () or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word ''senescence'' can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. Organismal senescence inv ...

. She continued her study of telomeres as a postdoctoral fellow in Elizabeth Blackburn's laboratory. In 1991, she joined the Genetics Department at

Baylor College of Medicine Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a medical school and research center in Houston, Texas, within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate Sc ...

. In 2004, she moved to the Salk Institute.

Research career

In 1989, Lundblad identified a gene named '' EST1'' ("ever shorter telomeres") in which telomeres are lost, and found that ''EST1'' encoded a regulatory subunit of telomerase. Later, collaborating with Nobel laureate

Tom Cech Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947) is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, ...

, she discovered the catalytic subunit of telomerase and identified it as a

reverse transcriptase A reverse transcriptase (RT) is an enzyme used to generate complementary DNA (cDNA) from an RNA template, a process termed reverse transcription. Reverse transcriptases are used by viruses such as HIV and hepatitis B to replicate their genomes, ...

with associated RNA. In 2017, three women full professors at the Salk Institute filed gender discrimination suits against the institute, pointing out that research funding was not distributed fairly, that only 13% of the research staff were women, and that of the five smallest laboratory spaces, four were assigned to women, among other problems. Salk Institute responded that Lundblad was "consistently ranking below her peers in producing high quality research and attracting" grant support and that each of the three professors ranked in "the bottom quartile of her peers". Scientific colleagues across the country objected to this characterization of Lundblad, including Nobel laureate

Carol Greider Carolyn Widney Greider (born April 15, 1961) is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology ...

, whose work also concerns telomerase, and who said Lundblad was "one of the few icons in the field," and that "for me to read in a press release that she's somehow in the bottom quartile rang really poorly to me." In August, 2018, Lundblad settled the lawsuit out of court with undisclosed remedies offered by the institute. In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology — one of 16 women out of the 88 new fellows that year.

Honors and awards

* 1997 DeBakey Excellence in Research Award from Baylor College of Medicine * 2008 Pearl Mester Greengard Prize from Rockefeller University. * 2015

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology

Selected works

Nugent CI, Hughes TR, Lue NF, Lundblad V.(1996) "Cdc13p: a single-strand telomeric DNA-binding protein with a dual role in yeast telomere maintenance." ''Science'' 274(5285):249-52. Lundblad V, Wright WE. (1996) "Telomeres and telomerase: a simple picture becomes complex." ''Cell'' 87(3):369-75. Virta-Pearlman V, Morris DK, Lundblad V. (1996) "Est1 has the properties of a single-stranded telomere end-binding protein." ''Genes Dev.'' 10(24):3094-104. Lendvay TS, Morris DK, Sah J, Balasubramanian B, Lundblad V. (1996) "Senescence mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a defect in telomere replication identify three additional EST genes." ''Genetics'' 144(4):1399-412. Linger J, Hughes TR, Shevchenko A, Mann M, Lundblad V, Cech TR. )1997) "Reverse transcriptase motifs in the catalytic subunit of telomerase." ''Science''. 276(5312):561-7.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lundblad, Victoria American geneticists American women geneticists American microbiologists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Baylor College of Medicine faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni Harvard University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Date of birth missing (living people)