Elizabeth Blackburn

Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.

Exercise mitigates the effects of stress - and stress, we know, shortens telomeres. In fact, early studies indicate that stress reduction techniques like meditation help people maintain the length of their telomeres.

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.

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

One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Tracing the beginnings of the interwoven stories of science can be arbitrary, as beginnings are so often lost in the mists of time.

Researchers have found that the brain definitely sends nerves directly to organs of the immune system and not just to the heart and the lower gut. In that way, too, the brain is influencing the body.

In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.

If we think of our chromosomes - they carry our genetic material - as being like shoelaces, I work on the plastic tips at the end that protect them.

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.

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

As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands.