Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS, FAA, FRSNis an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is currently the President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 November 1948
CityHobart, Australia
CountryAustralia
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.
I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.
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.
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.
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.