Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes

Genes load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger.

Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn is more optimistic and says, "Every sign, including genetics, says there's some causality [between telomeres] and the nasty things that happen with aging." She notes that there is a direct link between the shortened telomeres and certain diseases. For example, if you have shortened telomeres- if your telomeres are in the bottom third of the population in terms of length-then your risk of cardiovascular disease is 40 percent greater. "Telomere shortening," she concludes, "seems to underlie the risks for the diseases that kill you...heart disease, diabetes, cancer, even Alzheimer's.

Remember, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Don’t be too timid or squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

To an extent that has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community, telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres, it turns out, are listening to you. They absorb the instructions you give them. The way you live can, in effect, tell your telomeres to speed up the process of cellular aging. But it can also do the opposite.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such an achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. —Albert Einstein, as quoted in the New York Times, March 29, 1972

It turns out that our perspective has a surprising amount of influence over the body’s stress response. When we turn a threat into a challenge, our body responds very differently. Psychologist Elissa Epel is one of the leading researchers on stress, and she explained to me how stress is supposed to work. Our stress response evolved to save us from attack or danger, like a hungry lion or a falling avalanche. Cortisol and adrenalin course into our blood. This causes our pupils to dilate so we can see more clearly, our heart and breathing to speed up so we can respond faster, and the blood to divert from our organs to our large muscles so we can fight or flee. This stress response evolved as a rare and temporary experience, but for many in our modern world, it is constantly activated. Epel and her colleague, Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, have found that constant stress actually wears down our telomeres, the caps on our DNA that protect our cells from illness and aging. It is not just stress but our thought patterns in general that impact our telomeres, which has led Epel and Blackburn to conclude that our cells are actually “listening to our thoughts.” The problem is not the existence of stressors, which cannot be avoided; stress is simply the brain’s way of signaling that something is important. The problem—or perhaps the opportunity—is how we respond to this stress. Epel and Blackburn explain that it is not the stress alone that damages our telomeres. It is our response to the stress that is most important. They encourage us to develop stress resilience. This involves turning what is called “threat stress,” or the perception that a stressful event is a threat that will harm us, into what is called “challenge stress,” or the perception that a stressful event is a challenge that will help us grow. The remedy they offer is quite straightforward. One simply notices the fight-or-flight stress response in one’s body—the beating heart, the pulsing blood or tingling feeling in our hands and face, the rapid breathing—then remembers that these are natural responses to stress and that our body is just preparing to rise to the challenge. •

los extremos de nuestros cromosomas se pueden alargar, y como resultado, el envejecimiento es un proceso dinámico que se puede acelerar o ralentizar y en algunos aspectos incluso revertir.

So Caldwell delivers her lecture. Not to Elizabeth Blackburn, Günter Blobel or Carol Greider, but to a ten-year-old girl. That’s humbling, in a way. But only in a way. Caldwell is still the one who made all the connections and found what was there to be found. Who entered the jungle and brought the hungry pathogen back alive. Ophiocordyceps caldwellia. That’s what they’ll call it, now and for ever. As

The real differences between Lisa’s and Kara’s rates of aging lie in the complex interactions between genes, social relationships and environments, lifestyles, those twists of fate, and especially how one responds to the twists of fate. You’re born with a particular set of genes, but the way you live can influence how your genes express themselves. In some cases, lifestyle factors can turn genes on or shut them off.

One study has found that people who tend to focus their minds more on what they are currently doing have longer telomeres than people whose minds tend to wander more.5 Other studies find that taking a class that offers training in mindfulness or meditation is linked to improved telomere maintenance.6

Telomeres, which shorten with each cell division, help determine how fast your cells age and when they die, depending on how quickly they wear down.

Renewing cells include some types of normal cells that can divide, like immune cells; progenitor cells, which can keep dividing even longer; and those critical cells in our bodies called stem cells, which can divide indefinitely as long as they are healthy.

Senescent cells can leak proinflammatory substances that make you vulnerable to more pain, more chronic illness. Eventually, many senescent cells will undergo a preprogrammed death. The

Hayflick limit, the natural limit that human cells have for dividing, and the stop switch happens to be telomeres that have become critically short. Are

Why do people age differently? One reason is cellular aging.

No seas muy tímido ni quisquilloso sobre tus acciones. Toda la vida es un experimento. Mientras más experimentos hagas, mejor”.

El ser humano es una parte limitada en el tiempo y espacio del todo que llamamos “Universo”. Pero percibe sus pensamientos, sensaciones y a sí mismo como algo separado del resto (como una ilusión óptica de su conciencia). Esta ilusión es una especie de prisión que nos limita sólo a nuestros deseos y al afecto por unas cuantas personas cercanas. La tarea es liberarnos de esta prisión al ampliar nuestro círculo de compasión hasta abrazar a todas las criaturas vivientes y a toda la naturaleza en la plenitud de su belleza. Nadie es capaz de lograr esto por completo, pero el esfuerzo es parte de la liberación y una base para la seguridad interna. ALBERT EINSTEIN, New York Times, 29 de marzo de 1972

Nuestros genes son como el hardware de una computadora, no podemos cambiarlos. Los telómeros son parte del epigenoma, y éste es como el software, necesita programación. Nosotros somos los programadores. Hasta cierto punto, controlamos las señales químicas que hacen los cambios. Nuestros telómeros son sensibles, escuchan, nivelan y calibran las circunstancias actuales en el mundo. Juntos podemos mejorar el código de programación.

Several mind-body techniques, including meditation and Qigong, have been shown to reduce stress and to increase telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes telomeres.

one of the key hallmarks of aging is the accumulation of senescent cells. These are cells that have permanently ceased reproduction. Young human cells taken out of the body and grown in a petri dish divide about forty to sixty times until their telomeres become critically short, a point discovered by the anatomist Leonard Hayflick that we now call the Hayflick limit. Although the enzyme known as telomerase can extend telomeres—the discovery of which afforded Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak a Nobel Prize in 2009—it is switched off to protect us from cancer, except in stem cells. In 1997, it was a remarkable finding that if you put telomerase into cultured skin cells, they don’t ever senesce.

The iPhone mind-wandering study showed that when people are not thinking about what they’re doing, they’re just not as happy as when they’re engaged. As

Rumination is a loop of repetitive, unproductive thoughts about something that’s bothering you. If you’re not sure how often you ruminate, now you can start to notice. Most stress triggers are short-lived, but we humans have the remarkable ability to give them a vivid and extended life in the mind, letting them fill our headspace long after the event has passed. Rumination, also known as brooding, can slip into a more serious state known as depressive rumination, which includes negative thoughts about oneself and one’s future. Those thoughts can be toxic.

Snow White had long ceased to feel self-conscious about talking to animals. They'd always taken to her, even in the years before her father died. And afterward, when everything changed, it was the animals who'd saved her from despair in the face of the Queen's cruelty. Their love had convinced Snow White that she was indeed worth loving, and their joy had convinced her there was happiness yet to be found in the world. It was with the strength they lent her that Snow White had chosen joy over bitterness, and their constant companionship kept her on that path.

Leagues away, her castle stood empty, and her country awaited a ruler. "Come," she said to the birds around her. "Let's get dinner ready. And then it will be time to go home.

The worst stressors—exposure to violence, trauma, abuse, and mental illness—are shaped by a surprising factor: the level of income inequality in a region. For example, countries with the biggest gap between their richest citizens and their poorest have the worst health and the most violence.

teamed up with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery of telomerase. In a study funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense, they found that three months of whole-food, plant-based nutrition and other healthy changes could significantly boost telomerase activity, the only intervention ever shown to do so.69 The study was published in one of the most prestigious medical

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