Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes

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.

Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. As telomeres become shorter, then cells age and die more quickly. In simple terms, as your telomeres get shorter, your life gets shorter.

We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan.

It is unlikely that changes in telomeres are influencing the lifespan of the worm. That is because telomeres only shorten when cells divide. Most of the cells of the worm stop dividing when the worm becomes an adult.

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.

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

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.

It will be useful for you to know your biological age and maybe to change your lifestyle habits if you find you have short telomeres.

We see that mice that undergo caloric restriction show a lower telomere shortening rate than those fed with a normal diet. These mice therefore have longer telomeres as adults, as well as lower rates of chromosome anomalies.

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.

You can open up a centenarian's brain, and you'll see some areas that look like that of a 50-year-old or of a 110-year-old. You can have variation in the basic process of aging, called senescence, in different parts of the same body.

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.

Aging is not one process. It's many different things going on that cause us to age. I have a program that at least slows down each of these different processes.

In 1978, Elizabeth Blackburn, working with Joe Gall, identified the DNA sequence of telomeres. Every time a cell divides, it gets shorter. But telomeres usually don't. So there must be something happening to the telomeres to keep their length in equilibrium.

We had discovered something unheard of: the more chronic stress you are under, the shorter your telomeres, meaning the more likely you were to fall victim to an early disease span and perhaps untimely death. Our findings meant that people's life events and the way we respond to these events can change how you maintain your telomeres.

that's an incredibly hopeful message for us humans to be receiving from pond scum, because it turns out that as we humans age, our telomeres do shorten, and remarkably, that shortening is aging us. Generally speaking, the longer your telomeres, the better off you are. It's the overshortening of telomeres that leads us to feel and see signs of aging. My skin cells start to die and I start to see fine lines, wrinkles. Hair pigment cells die. You start to see gray. Immune system cells die. You increase your risks of getting sick. In fact, the cumulative research from the last 20 years has made clear that telomere attrition is contributing to our risks of getting cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer's, some cancers and diabetes, the very conditions many of us die of.

A short telomere represents a persistent and non-repairable damage to the cells, which is able to prevent their division or regeneration.

Telomerase Activation is the single most promising approach to reversing the effects of aging.

Biological age is the key component of the aging process.

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.

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.

Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

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.

I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.

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.