Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart in 1948. She spent her childhood and teenage years in Launceston, and later studied in Melbourne, the UK and the US. In 2009, along with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, becoming the only Australian woman to have won a Nobel prize in any field. Blackburn continues to research disease, stress, ageing, and our capacity to alter our lifespans. This story, one of a collection that examines each of the lives of the seventeen women who have won Nobel prizes for science, imagines Blackburn as a smart and curious girl, sensitive to the lives of those around her.