Ageing is so many different things, and cells being able to self-renew is part of the picture but not all of it.
Interpretation
Ageing involves various biological processes, including cellular self-renewal, which are part of a complex picture.
In this quote, Elizabeth Blackburn emphasizes that aging cannot be defined solely by the biological ability of cells to regenerate. It encompasses a multitude of factors and processes, suggesting that our understanding of aging is complex and multifaceted, requiring a broader exploration beyond just cellular mechanisms.
In practice
In a lecture on longevity, this quote beautifully illustrates the complexity of the ageing process.
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.
We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.
Checking your telomere length is a bit like weighing yourself: you get this single number which depends on a lot of factors. Telomere length gives a sense of your underlying health.
We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.
For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.
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.
There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe.
The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.
Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.
A study of Disease-of Pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast-is certainly being pursue in the laboratories of more than one great country. Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies but whole districts - such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.
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