Elizabeth Blackburn is an Australian-American Nobel laureate. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.
Famous Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes
I’ve only actively promoted what we always hope is good science.Ageing is so many different things, and cells being able to self-renew is part of the picture but not all of it.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.Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.Being senior enough in the field, having enough solidity, I don’t feel afraid of being marginalized.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.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.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.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 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.
