Elizabeth Blackburn

Scientist

1948-11-26

Elizabeth Blackburn is an Australian-American molecular biologist whose work on telomeres and telomerase transformed cell biology research. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Quotes by Elizabeth Blackburn

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.
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Observational studies show that exercise, nutritional supplements and reducing psychological stress can help. Chronic high stress and smoking can lead to accelerated telomere shortening.
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Challenges in medicine are moving from 'Treat the symptoms after the house is on fire' to 'Can we preserve the house intact?'
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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.
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Tracing the beginnings of the interwoven stories of science can be arbitrary, as beginnings are so often lost in the mists of time.
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I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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