ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 is an exploration of the creative process in contemporary, laboratory science. Scientific method, as it is taught, is clear and objective: hypothesize, experiment, see if the hypothesis is confirmed, if not, start again. This chapter looks instead at the creative process as it was lived by Elizabeth Blackburn and her collaborators. When Blackburn was introduced to a quirky one-celled organism, Tetrahymena thermophilia, she “fell in love.” It was the ideal organism to study telomeres, the caps that prevented chromosomes from unraveling. She was curious about telomeres’ structure and found mystery in how they were formed. Working with a peer with different expertise and a determined graduate student who wouldn’t give up, with the courage to risk a cockamamie experiment and an intuition that went against received wisdom, a series of experiments uncovered findings that thrilled the investigators and startled the field.
