Helen Blau was born in London and holds dual citizenship in the United States and the U.K. But she spent most of her childhood in Europe. “I loved that my family traveled so much,” says Blau, who attended summer schools in the Swiss Alps and lived with French and Austrian families. “The experience made me adventurous, encouraged me to take risks, and exposed me to different languages and cultures—all of which shaped my development.”
That same sense of unlimited possibilities ultimately guided her science. “I enjoy taking on new things,” says Blau. And she’s not afraid to question dogma.“When I was a student—an undergraduate and then graduate student—the dogma was that once mammalian cells were differentiated, that was it. Their fate was irreversibly set. That’s why it’s called terminal differentiation. But I didn’t like the idea that decisions were terminal, maybe because I grew up in different countries and I ...
