Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes
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When scientists get old, they get interested in the brain, and I'm a little bit afraid I'm falling into that.
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What is it that keeps you so interested in the telomere? It's so intricate and complicated, and you want to know how it works.
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I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.
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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.
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For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.
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This enzyme, called telomerase, slows the rate at which telomeres degrade, and research indicates that healthy people with longer telomeres have less risk of developing the common illnesses of aging - like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, which are three big killers today.
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If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors.
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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.
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Medicine has been successful by treating diseases in a very specific way once the damage is done. But telomere length integrates a lot of factors together and gives you an overall picture of risk for what is now emerging as a lot of diseases that tend to occur together, such as diabetes and heart disease.
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In humans, the thing is that as we mature, our telomeres slowly wear down. So the question has always been: 'Did that matter?' Well, more and more, it seems like it matters.
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The goal is to learn more about telomere length and other markers of ageing, how best to measure these markers, how they are related to health and lifestyle, and how people respond to learning their own telomere length results.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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At Cambridge, there was a completely unintimidating culture, and there were no class divisions among the students.
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One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
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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.
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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.
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We're collecting about 100,000 telomere lengths in saliva samples and then looking at how those relate to both the extensive longitudinal clinical records that Kaiser is collecting and the genome sequence variations.
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Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.
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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.
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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.
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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.