Quotes from Elizabeth Blackburn

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 think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.

No one ever said, 'Be a doctor.' But because so many members of my extended family - aunts, uncles - were doctors, there was this expectation that I'd probably be a physician.

I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.

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.

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.

Cancer cells have a lot of other things that are really wrong with them, and we should never forget that these are cells that have become deaf to all the signals that the body sends out, such as you can multiply a certain amount, you can be in a certain place in the body, where to stay, where to move, and so on.

The most dangerous cancer cells are actually the ones that are more like stem cells, which have this ability to produce themselves over and over again. More and more cancer biologists say stem-cell-like cells in cancers are the most dangerous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.