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

Elizabeth Blackburn

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" Observational studies show that exercise, nutritional supplements and reducing psychological stress can help. Chronic high stress and smoking can lead to accelerated telomere shortening. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" Ageing is so many different things, and cells being able to self-renew is part of the picture but not all of it. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

" Being senior enough in the field, having enough solidity, I don't feel afraid of being marginalized. "

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

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

Elizabeth Blackburn

" Tracing the beginnings of the interwoven stories of science can be arbitrary, as beginnings are so often lost in the mists of time. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

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

Elizabeth Blackburn

" 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. "

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

" 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