by FERN SHEN
The next time you’re driving around Baltimore behind a car with the license plate TTGGGG, you might want to give it the thumbs-up. It belongs to Johns Hopkins professor Carol W. Greider, who today won the Nobel prize in Medicine.

Greider’s unusual auto tags refer to a genetic sequence associated with telomeres, the chromosomal structures that she has been explaining and which open up dramatic new treatment possibilities for cancer and even aging.

Greider, 48, shares the prize with her collaborators, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, of the University of California at San Francisco, and Jack W. Szostak, who was at Harvard Medical School and is now at Massachusetts General Hospital and is also associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Greider has always been a standout character. The daughter of a University of California physics professor, she was active in the obscure sport of equestrian vaulting, in which riders perform gymnastic feats like headstands while on a moving horse.

In her lab in Baltimore, she’s been known to occasionally relieve the tension or tedium by yelling “Human pyramid!” and everyone gets down on the floor and forms one.

Among her peers in the field of genetics and molecular biology, however, Geider is known for her precocious break-through work discovering and explaining telomeres, which hold together and protect the ends of chromosomes, like those plastic caps at the end of a shoelace.

She and her collaborators worked together in the late 1970s and early 1980s on the early investigations into telomeres. The three predicted and ultimately discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains the length and integrity of these chromosome ends.

Here’s Hopkins’ press release on Greider’s Nobel award and the page they put together on her. They haven’t yet added her to the Hopkins website’s list of  previous Nobel winners.

There’s a news conference today on Greider’s award at noon in the Tilghman Auditorium in the Richard Starr Ross Building on Rutland Avenue, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Here’s a story in The Washington Post that give a feel for how Greider combines the roles of world class scientist with Roland Park mother of two.