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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. "

Elizabeth Blackburn

Curious

Animals

Living

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

Elizabeth Blackburn

Biology

Interesting

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

Years

Story

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Get

Health

" I've only actively promoted what we always hope is good science. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "