María Blasco

Spanish scientist specializing in telomeres and telomerase, director of the National Oncology Research Center (CNIO). His work with telomeres to extend the lives of mice has taken the world by storm and paves a solid path to significantly extending human life.With a doctoral degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, she worked as a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of New York and, in 1997, headed her own research team at the National Centre for Biotechnology in Madrid. Since 2003 she has been director of the Molecular Oncology Programme at CNIO. In 2010 she founded the biotechnology company Life Length, which carries out research into the life expectancy of each individual. She has been awarded numerous national and international prizes including, in recent years, the Santiago Ramón y Cajal National Research Prize, the “Rey Jaime I” Prize for Basic Research, and the Gold Medal of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).