Shoelaces with little caps at the end that stops them from fraying. Elizabeth Blackburn has compared this to the purpose of the telomeres, which she studied. In her lectures, she used these large shoelaces to illustrate this. The telomeres are the end bits in the chromosomal DNA molecules. They are shaped to partly protect the chromosomes, but the telomeres shorten slightly with every cell division.
Elizabeth Blackburn donated the shoelaces to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2022.
For women Nobel Prize laureates, the choice of attire for the Nobel Prize banquet is more complicated than for men. Men wear tailcoats, while women wear long evening dresses that can be in a variety of colours and designs. Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 laureate in medicine, had only a black dress and wanted to wear another colour to the banquet. The day before she went to the Nobel Week in Stockholm, she found this dress in a small shop in Paris. She wore her black dress to the award ceremony and changed into this red dress for the banquet.
The dress was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Elizabeth Blackburn in 2009.
