Do we like Elizabeth Blackburn?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on harm and a long run of standing up for science, with one awkward email from her Salk days holding her off a 9.
Blackburn is the Nobel laureate who helped discover telomeres, the protective caps on our chromosomes. She is also a scientist who gets out on the street for her field. In March 2025 she made her own protest signs for a San Francisco rally against proposed medical research cuts, one reading “Got polio? Me neither, thanks to science.”
Her best-known political stoush came in 2004. The White House declined to reappoint her to the President’s Council on Bioethics, and she was the only one of 17 members whose term wasn’t renewed. She says it was because she backed therapeutic cloning and opposed federal limits on stem cell funding. Chairman Leon Kass denied that and said the council was “diverse by design”.
The messier chapter is Salk. She became president of the institute in 2016, then left in 2018 after announcing her retirement in December 2017, while gender discrimination suits from women scientists were running against the place. Salk denied discriminating, and settled the suits without admitting liability. Blackburn wasn’t a defendant, but a June 2017 email of hers to one plaintiff said “Families have disagreements. But they don’t litigate their disagreements.”
Salk’s lawyer called the email a sincere effort to avoid litigation, while the plaintiff’s side leaned on it in court. One account from the women involved says she couldn’t shift the institute’s power dynamics, though Blackburn declined to be interviewed for that piece. That’s a genuine mark on the nice test, but one episode rather than a pattern, and the record on how she treats colleagues otherwise is thin.
On the harm test there’s simply nothing to find. In 2026 she told Scientific American that efforts to bring underrepresented people into science are being undermined and that attacks on truth in public debate are a problem. We found no sign of her pushing conspiracy theories, attacking anyone’s rights or working with people who do.
So would we support her? Yes. She’s a world-class scientist who keeps turning up for research, for evidence and for opening the field to more people. The Salk email stops it being a perfect score, and the record we could confirm is mostly interviews and news from a few key moments, not a full diary.