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.
Interpretation
Blackburn compares chromosomes to shoelaces, emphasizing the importance of their protective ends.
In this quote, Elizabeth Blackburn uses an analogy between chromosomes and shoelaces to illustrate her work on telomeres, which are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. Just as plastic tips prevent shoelaces from fraying, telomeres protect our genetic material from deterioration, highlighting the crucial role they play in maintaining the integrity of our DNA and overall cellular health.
In practice
In a lecture about genetics, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of telomeres in DNA protection.
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.
Being senior enough in the field, having enough solidity, I don't feel afraid of being marginalized.
If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.
So if the worth of the arts were measured by the matter with which they deal, this art-which some call astronomy, others astrology, and many of the ancients the consummation of mathematics-would be by far the most outstanding. This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathe matics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service.
If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.
Climate change: It's here. If we don't react, war, pestilence and famine will follow close behind
If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.
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