María Blasco Marhuenda Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.

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.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

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.

There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.

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.

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.

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.

It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.

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.

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

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

Now, remember that little pond scum critter Tetrahymena? The craziest thing was, Tetrahymena cells never got old and died. Their telomeres weren't shortening as time marched on. Sometimes they even got longer. Something else was at work, and believe me, that something was not in any textbook. So working in my lab with my extraordinary student Carol Greider -- and Carol and I shared the Nobel Prize for this work -- we began running experiments and we discovered cells do have something else. It was a previously undreamed-of enzyme that could replenish, make longer, telomeres, and we named it telomerase. And when we removed our pond scum's telomerase, their telomeres ran down and they died. So it was thanks to their plentiful telomerase that our pond scum critters never got old.

My DNA is building a product and a service.