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A “new era for science” with Obama: Blackburn

Divya Gandhi

Award-winning biologist in Bangalore to deliver lecture

— Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Professor Elizabeth H. Blackburn with her husband Professor John Sedat on the Infosys campus in Bangalore on Sunday.

Bangalore: For award-winning biologist and outspoken advocate of stem-cell research, Elizabeth Blackburn, the new Barack Obama administration in the U.S. signals “a new era for science.”

“The previous administration had this strange impression that science was the enemy of morality,” said Prof. Blackburn who was, in 2004, famously dismissed from the President’s Council on Bioethics by the then President George Bush for her criticism of his restrictive policy on embryonic stem cell research.

Prof. Blackburn is in the city to deliver a lecture titled ‘Chromosome ends and human health and disease,’ the first in a three-city series in India co-sponsored by Cell Press and TNQ Books and Journals. During her visit to the Infosys campus at Electronics City on Sunday, Professor Blackburn spoke to The Hindu on the unfettering of science by the new administration in the United States

President Obama, who is expected to lift Bush-era restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research, represents an administration that “that does not believe that science is somehow evil,” she said.

Prof. Blackburn is currently the Morris Herzstein Endowed Professor in Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

With the sharp noon sun reflecting off avant-garde chrome and glass buildings, Professor Blackburn and her husband, John Sedat, Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF, took the customary golf-buggy tour of the sprawling Infosys campus.

Speaking of the implications of outsourcing on the U.S. economy, she said: “The reflex at this time of economic crisis, when five million Americans have lost jobs, might be to say ‘don’t outsource.’ But that is not necessarily the right response if we want to have a vibrant economy. A protectionist viewpoint may not help create more jobs.”

While she got her first-hand look at the “high-tech activities that we hear of” at Infosys where hundreds of young IT professionals provide software services to clients around the world, Prof. Blackburn said: “India has a long history of scientific enquiry and scholarship.”

It is the job of education to excite young people about basic science at a time when biotechnology and IT are attracting professionals. “Those who love it will find it,” she said.

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