A biography for Elizabeth Blackburnhasn’t been written yet.
“Observational studies show that exercise, nutritional supplements and reducing psychological stress can help. Chronic high stress and smoking can lead to accelerated telomere shortening.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Challenges in medicine are moving from 'Treat the symptoms after the house is on fire' to 'Can we preserve the house intact?'”
“Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“At Cambridge, there was a completely unintimidating culture, and there were no class divisions among the students.”
“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.”
“One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.”
“I've only actively promoted what we always hope is good science.”
“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.”