Words matter. These are the best Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was born in the small city of Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, in 1948. My parents were family physicians. My grandfather and great grandfather on my mother’s side were geologists.
I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.
I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge, and then I got introduced to Fred Sanger. I was very conscientious, and I asked him when I first got there if I should start reading up on things. But he said, ‘No, I think you can just start these experiments,’ so I plunged right in.
Exercise mitigates the effects of stress – and stress, we know, shortens telomeres. In fact, early studies indicate that stress reduction techniques like meditation help people maintain the length of their telomeres.
Checking your telomere length is a bit like weighing yourself: you get this single number which depends on a lot of factors. Telomere length gives a sense of your underlying health.
In my lab, we’re finding that psychological stress actually ages cells, which can be seen when you measure the wearing down of the tips of the chromosomes, those telomeres.
I’m pretty good about getting some exercise every day – well, most days. The secret for me was to put the elliptical in front of the TV.
The conservative statement is that telomere length is a biomarker, but it’s probably not passive. There are some very intimate relationships between things such as molecular markers for inflammation and telomere health.
Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.
No one ever said, ‘Be a doctor.’ But because so many members of my extended family – aunts, uncles – were doctors, there was this expectation that I’d probably be a physician.
We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.
If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors.
If we think of our chromosomes – they carry our genetic material – as being like shoelaces, I work on the plastic tips at the end that protect them.
Cancer cells have a lot of other things that are really wrong with them, and we should never forget that these are cells that have become deaf to all the signals that the body sends out, such as you can multiply a certain amount, you can be in a certain place in the body, where to stay, where to move, and so on.
I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.
In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what’s inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.
One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Observational studies show that exercise, nutritional supplements and reducing psychological stress can help. Chronic high stress and smoking can lead to accelerated telomere shortening.
We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.
Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.
Cancer cells have had so many other things go wrong with them, genetic, non-genetic changes, that those cells, one of the things they then get selected for is that they have lots of telomerase because now the telomeres in those cells get maintained.
In my early work, our molecular views of telomeres were first focused on the DNA.
Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes in cells. Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying.
Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.
In 2004, results from a study that I worked on with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, linked chronic stress to shortening of telomeres.
Tracing the beginnings of the interwoven stories of science can be arbitrary, as beginnings are so often lost in the mists of time.
I spent my first 4 years living in the tiny town of Snug, by the sea near Hobart. Curious about animals, I would pick up ants in our backyard and jellyfish on the beach.
Challenges in medicine are moving from ‘Treat the symptoms after the house is on fire’ to ‘Can we preserve the house intact?’
Generally, we try to have a situation where the person is healthy, so you’re not confounded by disease. So, that means that healthy individuals are donating their blood samples for the studies.
Researchers have found that the brain definitely sends nerves directly to organs of the immune system and not just to the heart and the lower gut. In that way, too, the brain is influencing the body.
As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands.
When scientists get old, they get interested in the brain, and I’m a little bit afraid I’m falling into that.
Basically, when you look at different types of cells, such as fibroblasts, which form connective tissue, or epithelial cells, from saliva, you see general correlations within a person. If telomeres are up for one cell type, they’re up for others overall.
