Telomere Quotes

If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn

They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. ~ Rebecca Skloot

The efficacy of TA-65 is incremental. It does seem to stop telomere shortening and minutely lengthen telomeres, but not in the profound way that future drugs will. One natural compound that may prove more powerful and more affordable may be available by the time this book is published. You can find updates on it (not allowed to give a link) Still, TA-65 us currently being used by the authors of this book, and Dr. Woynarowski is one of the physicians who is licensed to distribute it. ~ Michael Fossel

The goal is to learn more about telomere length and other markers of ageing, how best to measure these markers, how they are related to health and lifestyle, and how people respond to learning their own telomere length results. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn

Medicine has been successful by treating diseases in a very specific way once the damage is done. But telomere length integrates a lot of factors together and gives you an overall picture of risk for what is now emerging as a lot of diseases that tend to occur together, such as diabetes and heart disease. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn

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. ~ Michio Kaku

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. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn