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" At Cambridge, there was a completely unintimidating culture, and there were no class divisions among the students. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

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" I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" When scientists get old, they get interested in the brain, and I'm a little bit afraid I'm falling into that. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" We're involved in a very large study that's federally funded and being done with Kaiser Permanente, and saliva is a very non-invasive way to get cells from the body. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" When you bring telomerase RNA levels down by using a mechanism that targets the RNA for destruction, the cells which were running on very high telomerase levels are now running on a lean diet of telomerase. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" The most dangerous cancer cells are actually the ones that are more like stem cells, which have this ability to produce themselves over and over again. More and more cancer biologists say stem-cell-like cells in cancers are the most dangerous. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" In my early work, our molecular views of telomeres were first focused on the DNA. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" Challenges in medicine are moving from 'Treat the symptoms after the house is on fire' to 'Can we preserve the house intact?' "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn