Carol Greider had to take remedial classes in elementary school because she is dyslexic. Though her grades were good, her GRE scores suffered and only two graduate schools accepted her, Cal Tech and U.C. Berkeley. She chose Berkeley to work with Elizabeth Blackburn. Research into the mechanisms of chromosome maintenance in cells led them to discover telomerase, an enzyme that protects telomeres and maintains the functionality of chromosomes. For this discovery, she shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak.
