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
We're involved in a very large study that's federally funded and being done with Kaiser Permanente, and saliva is a very non-invasive way to get cells from the body.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.